The Beautiful Miscellaneous
by That-Other-Doctor
Summary: Alone, in the silence of madness, with no hope of release. Far away, long ago, in the vast expanses of the universe. Two friends, their destinies intertwined across space and time, must find each other again in the dark. Because they are going to die, and they do not have to die alone. Out, out, brief candle . . . COMPLETE
1. Prologue: The Fall of King Macbeth

_To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,_  
_Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,_  
_To the last syllable of recorded time;_  
_And all our yesterdays have lighted fools_  
_The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!_  
_Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,_  
_That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,_  
_And then is heard no more. It is a tale_  
_Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,_  
_Signifying nothing._

* * *

Life's but a walking shadow, according to Shakespeare. Life's but that black, twitchy thing hovering off your shoulder, lying furtive and untouchable in the corner of your eye. An illusion of presence and a phantom of being.

Mr. Shakespeare, if life is but a shadow, then what is it a shadow of? Of truth? Of actuality? Of what we wish 'was' versus what really 'is'? A poor player: he who cannot make up is mind about what to do, what to stand for, and who to trust without running himself into the ground in a fit of piqued indecision. Life is a very poor player, indeed. Bloody rotten, in fact.

But a bloody rotten player of what, exactly?

Whose game had she found herself in, floating through the shredded remnants of her life like a paper airplane and pirouetting on her broken track like a lopsided ballerina in a music box?

Perhaps it is Time's game, its wax and wane, the coming and going of all things. Time is a web, woven by the glittering, tangled threads of maybe's and perhaps's and might-have-been's. They are tales told by an idiot, full of sound. Full of fury. And full of love, as well, Mr. Shakespeare. But what is love without fury? Is not one part of the other, complimentary to the point of inseparable? Is love good fury, or is fury malicious love? And are they shadows of poor-playing lives, too?

Out, out, brief candle . . . for she feels she is becoming too philosophical. No longer is she the truth-finder; she is now the truth-seeker.

She can hear them moving outside, beyond the uncrossable border between entrapment and freedom. Beyond the Time Barrier. She can hear them _tap-tap-tapping_ their swagger sticks against the far away outside walls, sending out a series of awkward, uneven rhythms that resound like broken glass against her eardrums. A melodious sound, even a horrible one, can become little more than bothersome after a while.

But an uneven sound . . . ah, well, that's a different matter entirely.

Chinese Water Torture, an interrogation method utilized by dripping water onto the scalp at irregular intervals, was rumored to be enough to drive men mad. After long durations, the victims were gradually driven frantic as a perceived hollow formed in the center of their skulls.

_Drip . . . drip . . . bloody drip_.

She is beginning to think they're doing it on purpose: leaving her alone in the dusty, cold darkness with nothing but their incessant tapping and her pockmarked memories for company.

Even the Voice has ceased his prattle.

She cannot hear him anymore. He is within her, speaking with her tongue and thinking with her mind. She can no longer differentiate between the sane reasoning of her rationality and the muted twittering of madness. The black and white was muted grey, the advanced form of lonliness has become indistinguishable from insanity.

_I am becoming like poor old King Macbeth_, she thinks, left to stew in her own self-pity and hopelessness until the last vestiges of humanity are stripped away, leaving nothing but the dark and the silence. Fair is foul and foul is fair. And one thing will lead to another in a never-ending cycle of misery and desolation. Her desolation, doomed to be her reality for the rest of her days. Life is but a shadow, and fate is the one who casts it.

"Two truths are told / As happy prologues to the swelling act / Of the imperial theme." She shouts in a wavery, sing-song alto, her arid throat squeezing shut in protest, it's sides cracked like dry pottery.

She is heard across the Time Barrier, and the door of her cell slams open as the guard dashes in, looking like an overripe, putrid tomato in all of his sweaty, meaty, disgusting glory. He is always there, always ready to come charging in looking like the fat King Henry of the prison's proverbial Versailles. He would be funny if he wasn't so infernally bothersome all the time, wasn't so quick to temper.

Wasn't so quick to violence.

"Not a word out of you."

He growls something along those lines. She can't really tell. His words have begun to blur together after so long, but his lovely messages are usually the same: shut the hell up or something nasty is going to happen.

Oh, sod it. If she was King Macbeth she may as well antagonize her Macduff. Time to strut and fret her hour upon the stage . . .

"I'll do as I like, thanks. 'Look like the innocent flower / But be the serpent under it.'" She chuckles and congratulates herself at the look of befuddlement that crosses her jailer's stupid complexion.

Poor old Macduff will have none of it, though. Like most people of small intellect, he reacts to that which he doesn't understand in the only way he can; by throwing his (rather substantial) weight around.

His great old mitt of a hand reaches out and snatches her by the hair, or whatever scruffy mess is left of it. She just smiles wickedly, which of course only serves to antagonize him further. She's lifted, up, up, up into the air. If the pain in her scalp wasn't so severe, and if she were a completely different person than whom circumstance had moulded her, then she would have to admire Macduff's strength. As it were, however, the only thing she can find herself doing is wetting whatever sorry excuse for phlegm is in her mouth and hacking it at Macduff's ugly, piggy little black eyes. The glob lands with a satisfying _glump_, right in the corner of his left eyeball.

Oh, that makes him angry!

A slap is like a bee-sting, aside from the surface area of impact and lasting emotional scarring. And the fact that bees don't usually _want_ to sting you. It kills them. They sting in self-defense, quickly, undramatically, as if trying to get the whole business done and over with as quickly as possible. In comparison, Macduff _likes_ to sting. Delivering his retribution doesn't weaken him. It empowers him. Harder and harder he brings the blows down, again and again, until her skin is raw, bloody, and purple like uncooked meat. The left side of her face, which has already been burnt into blackened anonymity, shrieks in red-hot agony.

And still she smiles. And still she shows him that she doesn't give a damn.

He stops once his own hand has grown sore. She can't open her eyes by this point, which is unfortunate, because it means that she can't savor the light of frustration on Macduff's face as he realizes he has, yet again, failed to break her. With a grunt of anger, he flings her prone form to the floor and kneels, making eye contact with her whether she wants to return it or not.

"You're not to say a word! Got that? Unless you start telling my boss what he wants to know, you keep your pommy mouth SHUT."

She clarifies, trying to sound lazy and uninterested. Unintimidated. "But I do have something to say. And I think you'll find it rather important, both you and your bosses."

Macduff doesn't say anything. But he doesn't start hitting her again either, which seems like a fair enough cue to continue,

"I've learned something, trapped here. I've remembered something that an old friend tried to make me understand, once upon a time. I think it may interest you."

"We hold in our hearts the capacity to see beyond ourselves and the tiny slice of creation on which we live and breathe. The universe is so much more than the flesh and bone of our bodies or the material gain of our worlds. Existence itself survives as a constant, throbbing ebb of life and death and creation, never-ending and stretching into nothingness whether you're a part of it or not. There will come a time when we will realize our true unimportance, when we understand that in the grand scheme of things, one person can't make a whole lot of difference. But that day will not be today. The present serves as someone's past and everyone's future, the now encompasses an impossible number of then's and was's and might-have-been's. We live in our own small pocket of eternity, in our own world of the beautiful miscellaneous, where everything happens because anything CAN happen."

"So you can just kill me now, if you want. Keeping me alive wouldn't make much of a difference. You see, you will never win because in my beautiful miscellaneous, you CAN'T win! That is why I will never give up hope. That is why I will never stop fighting you."

In recompense for that inspiration, she receives a punch, hard, right in the mouth. Immediatly, she is curled up and choking on her blood and flecks of her tongue, which she's bitten through in pained surprise.

Her guard guffaws in stupid pleasure, his stomach jiggling up and down like some over-ambitious child's water balloon.

"You are so eloquent, you know that, Macduff? So very good at speaking your mind." She mutters wetly through the globules of gunk in her mouth. Her burnt face has reached the point beyond describable pain.

He's probably too stupid to sense the scathing sarcasm of her words. Laughing idiotically to himself, he slams the heavy door shut, reestablishing the Time Barrier, and walks away. His footsteps echo until they fade away into silence.

Before long, she begins to hear the tapping. The motions are starting up again. Lennox will allow no respite.

She is alone.

"Hey Jude"

"Don't Make it Bad"

"Take a Sad Song, and Make it Better"

She isn't singing. Not really. How can she? Her mouth is cut and bloody, incapable of uttering a coherent sentence, never-mind a Beatle's ballad. She's doing her best, though, humming and muttering under her breath so that Macduff can't hear her. She's singing for herself, singing to ease the pain.

"The minute, you let her into your heart."

"Then you can start . . ."

"_To make it better . . ._"

Someone else, a voice from the shadows, finishes the first stanza of "Hey Jude". She can't help but scream in surprise. Someone must have slipped inside the Time Barrier while Macduff was leaving. Fueled by anger and uncertain fear, she wheels around with fists clenched and teeth barred.

"Who the hell is that?!" She snarls, but with her broken, bloody mouth, the words come out as, "Who tha hell ith thath?"

Standing there, scarred, emaciated, beaten, and lispy, she is suddenly aware of how sickly and weak she is. How non-threatening she must look. Anyone could do anything they wanted to her, and she probably wouldn't be able to fight them off.

There is a shift in the shadows. She lashes out at what she hopes is a face, but her wild, swinging blow barely glances a sleeve of scratchy tweed and impales itself in the rough surface of the wall. She howls in pain as knuckle cracks and connects with the impenetrable barriers of the cell. A hand, long and venous like a piano player's, grasps her thin wrist in a grip that's strong but not quite painful.

"It's me." A soothing, hypnotically-deep voice croons from the darkness. "Oh, what have they done to you?"

Her eyes widen until they occupy a significant portion of her gaunt face. Liquid tawny meets striking blue, locking gazes across the small space of the cell. A figure elongates from the shadows, a figure born from dreams and feared by nightmares. A figure from the edge of impossibility. A figure who she had resigned to never see again.

King Duncan, the virtuous one, had arrived.

And she falls into the embrace like it's the last, most important one in the universe.

He hugs her back, burying his misty eyes in the folds of her choppy, hacked-off hair.

"I'm here, Sarah." The Doctor whispers,

* * *

"And I'm going to get you out."


	2. Chapter 1: Of Things Long Lost

September 30th, 1986

South Croyden, London, England, Planet Earth

* * *

Sunlight, bright and stinging, was what forced itself through the tiny cracks in her eyelids and brought her back to the waking world. She was annoyed for a split second at the sudden break from her dreams, but that sentiment quickly faded as she felt the fatigue flee from her limbs, her body sigh in rested relief in the wake of a good night's sleep.

And she always did love a good lie-in; there really was nothing worse than waking up to the insensitive blare of an alarm clock at 6:30 in the morning. The breeze catching the edges of her tangled hair, the cozy glare of a mid-morning sun, and the tweeting of birds were the best ways to awaken a mind and start a new day.

Yeah right. Birds. There are no starlings, no sweet-voiced morning doves, in South Croyden.

Sarah Jane Smith grinned to herself and cast her duvet to the empty half of her bed. Smothering the sound of the few birds was the _zoom_ of the rush-hour traffic, horns honking and colorful Cockney swearing. No matter how many times she tried to tell herself otherwise, she was never waking up to nature. Not really. Anyone living in a city woke up to the sound of the lorries collecting the rubbish and kids fooling about as they made their ways to school.

Never mind. Anything was better than the bloody alarm clock!

"Ah, well." Sarah, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, forced herself into an upright position. "Another day . . ."

She stretched, and cringed as the pins and needles left her stiff arms. Absently, Sarah braced her hand against the unruffled half of the duvet and began to stand up. She quickly retracted it as her fingertips brushed the thick old blanket.

"I's cold." She murmured. One half of her brain wondered whether opening the window during the night had been such a clever idea.

The other half of her brain, however, dwindled on the stark reality of the empty, cold space of her bed, and the loneliness it represented.

Not for the first time, Sarah Jane Smith found herself gazing forlornly at yet another detail of her life she wasn't entirely satisfied with. She did that a lot, nowadays. For one who was used to an existence dashing from one thing to another in a whirlwind of excitement and suspense, everyday life seemed as dull and featureless as a 9-to-5 desk job. Sarah had found herself pointing out everything _wrong_ with it, attempting to identify the inconsistencies of mundanity. She found fault with everything, from the aspects of her journalistic career to her personal choices to the fact that she was waking up every morning to an empty bed and an empty heart.

"Oh, God." Sarah shook her head and ran her fingers through her tussled hair. "I really need to get out more."

Suddenly fueled by a newfound sense of purpose which she really couldn't put a name to, Sarah Jane Smith bounded to her feet and and dashed over to the mirror above her chest of drawers. Suddenly, she felt like a child on Christmas morning.

She faced the mirror and stared at her reflection, taking in her bedraggled, sleep-addled self.

"Alright, Sarah Jane. You're a grown woman with a well-paying career and health insurance. You are smart, capable, independent, pretty . . . " She flipped a loose strand of hair out of her face, "Well, most of the time. And you're still young . . . ish."

"You still turn heads in the street. You still know how to make people laugh. You have seen the universe in all of its complexity and beauty and could give the most stalwart theologist a run for their money. You know what it's like to feel the lowest of the low, and you got over it. You moved on, and you made a life for yourself."

"So stop moping around the house waiting for a juicy story to turn up. Get out there, seize the day, and do something amazing for yourself."

"Go be fantastic!"

* * *

2 minutes and 30 seconds later, Sarah Jane Smith found herself sitting (alone) at her kitchen counter, eating a bowl of cereal soaked with almost-but-not-quite-sour milk, all feelings of jubilation and self-fulfillment gone with the wind. Somehow, sliding down the hand-railing of your stairs so giddily that you cause yourself to fall over the banister and land on your arse, and then finding out your milk had gone off at least a week ago, tends to put one in a more realistic, not to mention sober, state of mind.

"Let's face it," Sarah pushed her Wheat-Os around her bowl half-heartedly, "I'm not as young as I used to be. I'm not chasing around the stars in a police box with a half-nut alien anymore. I can't do anything I really want to do anymore, because everything I _want_ to do is billions of miles away and thousands of years ago . . . probably. The real world doesn't work like that. We don't get what we want in this life just because we wish upon a star, and God knows I've done that plenty of times . . ."

"And now I'm talking to my cereal. Brilliant."

Sarah sighed and pushed her bowl away from her; she wasn't hungry anymore.

She buried her head in her hands, and took the time to notice the lines that had deepened around her knuckles, the once-elegant nails that had been bitten and widdled away to mere stubs. Sarah Jane suddenly felt tired, and too regretful and bitter for someone of her mere 30 something years of age.

She didn't feel like she could take on the world anymore. She remembered her empty flat and the cold, unwrinkled half of her bed, and she felt like who she really was: an overworked journalist, trying to hold on to a life that had taken flight and flown away, long ago.

"I have liv'd long enough: my way of life is fall'n into the sear."

Inevitably, she began to remember him. When she was in a bad mood, her thoughts always turned to the Doctor. She could be thinking about work, family, her very meager social life, the London _Times_, kittens, marmalade toast . . . and still somehow, someway, her train of thought would land her smack-dab in memories of a tall, gawky man in mismatched semi-bohemian clothing, and that stupid, wonderful grin forever plastered across his face.

"You can't really go back to the everyday, can you Doctor?" She whispered, "I think the thing you fail to mention to everyone who leaves you is how dull our lives will be compared to what they were with you. How unfulfilling they turn out to be."

"And how much of them we spend waiting for you to come back . . ."

* * *

"Hello Harry." She smiled, trying to sound cheerful over the line.

"_Oh . . . 'ello old girl. How are things?_"

"Oh, brilliant!" Sarah felt bad lying to him. "Fine as can be! Just wanted to check in and see how M15 were treating you."

"_Sarah!_" She could almost imagine the look of slack-jawed horror blooming across Harry Sullivan's chiseled features. "_You're not supposed to know about that!_"

"I do my best to keep informed. You of all people should know that."

"_Yes, well, do try not to shout it across an open line for all and sunder to hear, eh? Now, is there anything I can do for you?_"

"Nope. Just wanted to say hello."

There was a pause over the line. Sarah got nothing in her ear but fuzzy static for what felt like ages. She began to pace around her kitchen and wind the telephone chord around her finger in antsy impatience.

She finally asked, "Harry, are you still there?"

There was a nervous cough on the other end of the line, before he replied with a question of his own, "_Sarah, what's wrong?_"

She licked her lips. "Nothing! Nothing at all! What would ever give you that idea? Isn't it okay for a woman to call and say hello every once in a while?"

"'_Every once in a while_'_?_ _You're a very bad lier, old girl_."

"Thank you very much!" Sarah spat scathingly.

"_I haven't spoken to you in _six months_, Sarah. Six months is six months in the real world._" He said solemnly, "_Random small talk was never really one of your more endearing qualities, and is not a reason for you of all people to phone someone._"

She could feel her teeth grinding together. Already, she was beginning to regret calling her old friend in the first place.

"Harry Sullivan, I'm a journalist. Small talk, quote-end quote, is in my job description." She spoke with thinly-veiled mock sweetness.

He sounded skeptical. "_So . . . you're calling in regards to a story?_"

"I'm calling to say hello! Nothing more, nothing less."

_But I'm beginning to think it was a bad idea_, She added to herself.

There was another long, awkward pause, before he said, very quietly, "_That doesn't sound like the Sarah I know_."

Her patience was nearing its inevitable end. "It doesn't sound like the Sarah you _knew_. Tide and time wait for no man, and people change, Harry."

"_Sarah . . . you're lonely_."

"Stop."

"_You miss him_."

"Harry, stop it!"

"_He left you, Sarah. I'm sorry to have to be the one to say it . . . again, but he's gone. It's been more than 10 years. You need to move on_."

"How _dare_ you!" Sarah fumed, her reserve snapping as she scrunched the telephone chord in a balled fist, "I called you thinking I could say hello _without_ being persecuted by the bloody Spanish Inquisition! What do you know about my life? What could you _possibly _know?!"

"_I know enough. And I care about you too much to tell you anything but the honest truth._"

"_Take it from me, Sarah. Waiting for someone you love, waiting for someone who you know is never going to say yes, time goes by and before you know it, life has left you behind none-the-wiser and none-the-happier_. _Please, don't make the same mistakes I made_."

The line went dead, leaving Sarah standing alone with shaky hands and blood pounding in her eardrums.

"'Now, if you have a station in the file / not i' the worst rank of manhood, say 't.' Good old Macbeth . . ." She whispered, and then slowly replaced the telephone receiver on the wall. Her words stung, and she didn't think Harry would have been too impressed with being compared to the bottom of Shakespeare's proverbial slop bucket. At the very least, Sarah took some comfort in Macbeth's dismal rebuttal, took some comfort in soliloquizing her frustration upon the stage.

Harry hadn't changed, and he probably never would. In a world where the status quo was constantly changing and social expectation was but a scribble in the margin, a weak side-note, Harry Sullivan would always be the one, stalwart figure clinging to his outdated beliefs like a windswept sailor in treacherous, uncertain seas. It was maddening at times, but endearing in its own right. Harry was old-fashioned to the point of being antiquated, but he had a good heart. A heart of gold, in fact.

The worst part was . . . he was probably right. She _was _lonely.

"Oh, Sarah, you're an imbecile." She berated herself, adding to her mental list another aspect of her life that she'd thoroughly screwed up.

"If I were him, I would have given up on me a long time ago." She laughed hollowly, "Let's face it, I wouldn't have had the patience capacity!"

Sarah's bout of self-pity was suddenly interrupted by the _brrrrrrrring_ of the front buzzer, echoing through the house like the Sunday tolling of the church-bell.

"That was awfully quick." She muttered, trotting across the kitchen, through the sitting room, and over to the foyer of her flat. She could make out a figure through the frosted panes of her door window: a dark, lanky shadow around 6 feet tall.

Sarah grasped the doorknob, and was speaking before the door had even opened . . .

"Harry Sullivan, that was _not_ an invitation for you to . . ."

Sarah admonishment trailed off as she beheld the awkward, embarrassed stranger standing on her front doorstep, a stranger who most certainly was _not _Harry Sullivan.

He was on the thin-ish side, with a pale complexion and blue doe-eyes set deep under his brows. He had very fair, flaxen hair that gave him a rather innocent appearance, and was dressed in what Sarah could have sworn was an Edwardian cricket outfit. He smelled like celery and peppermint.

"Do you know who I am?" He asked hesitantly. His voice was surprisingly gruff for someone so boyish.

"Not a clue, mate." Sarah replied, contemplating how quickly she could dash to the phone . . . should the need arise.

"Oh, marvelous!" He sounded relieved, "I have a message for Sarah Jane Smith."

"Erm . . . that's me."

"Yes, well, obviously . . ." He shifted anxiously from foot to foot. Sarah noticed offhandedly that he was wearing a flaky pair of striped trousers . . .

"And the message?" She prompted.

The young stranger cast a nervous glance into the interior of her flat. He didn't meet her eye when he murmured, "May I come in? This may take a little while to explain."

Sarah's mouth fell open."And why should I let you into my flat?! You're a complete stranger! I've never seen you before in my life, I have no idea how you know where I live, and I have no idea why you're here. I don't even know your name!"

"My name is . . . Ian Chesterton." He decided, lamely, "And what I have to tell you is of the utmost importance."

"I'll bet it is."

"It concerns the future of the entire human race."

* * *

"And of your old friend . . . the Doctor."


	3. Chapter 2: An Empty Canvas

2nd Year of the New Age, 2067

The Cinder of Sol 3

* * *

The air was still and dead, hanging over the ground like long-accumulated dust over the mantels of a forgotten tomb. The entire landscape was wreathed in silence, unbroken by the merest crack, moan, groan, or twitter. The world was frozen in space and time.

But eventually, impossibly, absurdly . . . a sound did come, the sound of asthmatic brakes and heavy machinery, as alien to the blank slate of the earth as any extraterrestrial. It broke through the paralysis of the world; nobody was there to stir in its wake and revel at its illogical state of being. Nobody was there to bare witness to the sudden, wavery materialization of what appeared to be a tall wooden box, throwing itself into existence like a gaudy sploge of blue paint hurled onto a stark white canvas. When the object landed, nobody was there to see the two figures elongate from the darkness of the doorway, falling into the soupy mist on unsteady legs unused to the roughness of the ground, the cold, or the quiet.

Nobody saw them as they took in their surroundings. Nobody saw the two unlikely strangers: a lean young woman, browned by an alien sun and weathered by the trials and tribulations of a far away land, and a tall man, adorned in ratty, travel-worn clothing and a scarf trailing down to his legs until lost in the ground fog. Nobody saw his blue, blue eyes pierce the whiteness like searchlights, and nobody saw his wolfish teeth as he smiled.

"Well, this certainly isn't where we were supposed to end up." Nobody heard the man say, and though he sounded cheerful enough, the hesitant worry was clear in his deep-throated words.

"The TARDIS has gone wrong again." His companion agreed. Her English stuck on her tongue, as if she had learned it out of necessity rather than out of choice.

"Yes, well, even the best of us get it wrong sometimes, Leela." The man tried, unsuccessfully, to reassure his young friend.

Leela, knowing little of subtleties, was very blunt when she stated, "Doctor, the TARDIS is almost _always_ wrong."

"Spoilsport." The Doctor muttered under his breath, "Where's your sense of adventure?" He sounded if nothing else like an over-coddled child who'd had his favorite toy taken away.

To his surprise, the very literal-minded Leela didn't answer him. She had frozen, and had turned her clear gaze upon the barren, broken world. A low fog cast a milky white veil over the ground, covering the Doctor and Leela's legs up to their knees. The sky was dirty grey, like shoveled snow, clashing in monochromatic contrast with the sheer white fog blanketing the landscape. The air was stagnant and stale, and utterly silent. No wind blew, no birds sang, no animals scurried about in the scraggy undergrowth. To the Doctor, it was like walking around in a Ansel Addams photograph.

To Leela, it just felt _wrong_.

"What is this place?" She breathed quietly, as if afraid to disturb the peace.

The Doctor arched an eyebrow and shot a puzzled look her way, wondering what had made his fiery companion so subdued. She had simply resigned to stand and stare, and her knife was a long reach from her hand.

"I don't know." The Doctor admitted gruffly, "According to the scanner, this is Earth, but . . ."

"Something is different. Something is wrong." Leela finished. She was very resolute when she said, "This cannot be Earth. This is a bad place. An evil place."

The Doctor sniffed in disagreement, "If fog makes an evil, San Francisco would be Hell incarnate."

"You know that I do not know what this . . . 'San Francisco' is," Leela pouted, "and I also know that you are trying to distract me because you fear that you sense it also. There is something very wrong here. I know this. I can feel it, and I think you can feel it, too."

"Poppycock!" He snapped, "This is probably just rural Reykjavik in the slow season!"

It was then when the Doctor and Leela saw the bodies.

The wind from their breath, the tiny breeze from their words, had briefly banished the surrounding fog. On the roughly hewn ground, covering the grass like some macabre facsimile of upholstery, were piles upon piles of blackened, blistered skeletons.

It was not the roughness of the ground that had caused the Doctor and Leela to be unsteady on their feet; they were standing on corpses. Thousands upon _thousands _of corpses

"No . . ." Leela whispered, stunned.

The Doctor could not find it within himself to say even that. He had seen many things in his life, terrible things, but never anything like the carnage spread before him.

"We have to leave." Leela turned and looked at her friend pleadingly, "We have to go _now_."

"I must find out what happened here." The Doctor whispered, completely absorbed, "We can't leave."

"No!" She grasped the Doctor's forearms. "Please, Doctor. We need to go!"

He stared at her. "You know death, Leela. You have seen death many times before. You have grown up around death. You have been the _cause _of death! Despite my pleas, you've killed again and again and again. Why do you suddenly fear it?"

"This is not death!" She cried, "This is not the hunt! This is the slaughter! It is in the air, Doctor. The story is told in the bodies, in the ghosts of the long-past. Look at the bodies."

"Leela, I . . ."

"Go on, look!" She pointed, "See these two people embracing, even beyond life? See this child grasping his mother, who was unable to help him when the end came? See this boy, his mouth forever parted in a scream nobody will hear? This is destruction! Death and undue revenge was delivered to all, not to any one man, but to all men! And women! And children! The fire scorched the land and destroyed everyone and everything in its path, mad and random and terrible. There was no honor in these killings; there was only cowardice and the meaningless slaughter of the innocent. This was murder!"

The Doctor was dumbfounded. Jammed in the corner of her eyes, refusing to fall for pride and dignity's sake, were tiny droplets of crystalline liquid.

Leela, Warrior of the Sevateem, was crying.

"This isn't how it's supposed to be." He murmured, unable to find the right words of comfort, "If this is Earth, then this . . . massacre was never meant to happen. Not like this. Not here. Not now. I promise, Leela . . . I will set it ri . . ."

The Doctor's words were caught off . . . fading to muted mutterings and then to nothing at all. He cocked his head and stared, his eyes widening to alarming proportions in their sockets.

"The TARDIS came here for a reason. I did not input the coordinates for Earth. She landed here on her own power" He whispered, hesitant to break himself out of his semi-trance, "Something drew the old girl off course. Something familiar. Something powerful. I can feel it. I . . . can . . . sense . . . it."

Leela's bowed head darted up as the Time Lord suddenly scampered off into the fog.

"Doctor! Where are you going?"

"I can feel the TARDIS, Leela!" He bellowed over his shoulder. "Not our TARDIS, but a portion of it! I can hear her telepathic screams, crying out across time and space, pleading for help!"

"But how can that be? The TARDIS is the TARDIS. It is not broken in little pieces."

"You'd be surprised. She's as discombobulated as her owner."

Leela thought about agreeing, but, given that she didn't know the actual meaning of the word 'discombobulated', decided to remain quiet. She accompanied the Doctor as he stuck his head into the mist and scanned the ground like a keen bloodhound on a scent.

"It's here somewhere. Here somewhere . . . . . . . . . oh no . . ."

He froze. Except for his hands. The Doctor's hands were shaking, jittering like dead leaves in a winter storm. His skin, almost instantaneously, turned pale, feverish, ghost-like, making him one with the fog. For a moment, the passing moments seemed to stand still as the Time Lord fell to his knees and thrust his hands onto the ground, grasping for something Leela couldn't see.

"No . . . don't do this to me. Not like this . . . never like this . . . NOT LIKE THIS!"

The Doctor burbled incoherently under his breath, working himself into a right state of disarray. His body was shaking uncontrollably now, as if he were suffering from hypothermia. Leela reached out a hand to steady him, but the Doctor merely shrugged her away and curled into a crouching ball, trying to make himself as small as possible as he cradled something in his hands. He didn't look up. In fact, his eyes were squeezed shut, like a child's during a scary film.

He sighed, choking on his own words, "It would have survived. Of course it would have, and it would have communicated with the TARDIS. It's a part of the ship, brought us here . . . it tried to save her . . . tried to save her . . ."

Leela didn't know what to say. What she did know was this: whomever this 'her' was, Leela did not think the Doctor had been referring to the TARDIS.

The Doctor breathed softly through barely-parted lips, shifting the fog for a few seconds, revealing a delicate corpse different from the others.

"It's alone." Leela observed, disturbed.

"_She's_ alone." The Doctor corrected, but he didn't sound admonishing. He sounded broken, and brittle. And so very, very sad . . .

"In the midst of all this carnage, despite all of the company, this woman died alone: in the cold and the dark and the pain, at the epicenter of death on a monumental scale. She was alone when her final moments brought an end to her suffering. Nobody deserves to die like that. Not her. _Especially_ not her."

Leela was cautious, not willing to believe her own words. "You sound as if you knew this person."

"I do. _Did_."

The Doctor slowly got to his feet. In his hand, he held a silver chain from which hung a charred, dented, but definitely intact, hexagonal pendant adorned with a pattern that resembled cross-hashed circuitry.

A TARDIS key.

"I know every key like I know the TARDIS." He said solemnly, "I made this one myself, and I never forget the recipients of such gifts. I didn't know she had kept it with her . . . right to the end . . . right until the end of all things . . ."

"Who is that woman, Doctor?" Leela dared to ask.

The Doctor took some time to answer, but when he did, his voice was so thick with grief, Leela could barely understand him.

* * *

"The body is that of Sarah Jane Smith."


	4. Chapter 3: Hecate

Unknown Date

Unknown Location

* * *

She was so scared. She felt like a hunted animal, curled against the wall, listening to nought but the thumping of her horrified heart beating against her rib cage. She sat in the furthest corner from where she suspected the door was, deep in the liquid darkness, far away from the spot where the monsters came.

"Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair / And make me seated heart knock at my ribs?"

She stared at the blank wall, trying to visualize a door somewhere in the crevices of the Time Barrier. The door, she had found, had the most detestable habit of appearing and disappearing again on a whim, or on the orders of her captor and his lackies. Which didn't actually help her own particular predicament in any way. After all, a key to nothing, be it a key, is still a key to nothing.

Or perhaps, she shuddered at the thought, the door _was_ there, perfectly solid and perfectly real, and she just couldn't see it. Not because of the total blindness of the scorched, milky remnants of her left eye, and not out of choice, obviously, but out of the sickness of her ever-weakening mind. Perhaps the door _was_ sitting there, mocking her, laughing at the small mad woman crouching in a corner and screaming at shadows. Laughing at the little girl who couldn't tell what was real and was wasn't anymore. The door could exist, or it could not. And a nightmare could walk through that non-door at any moment, ready to leech ever more of her sanity from the remnants of a broken mind and a broken heart.

Or perhaps, she shuddered yet again, she had imagined the intermittent visits as well. Had she imagined the Dream Room? Had she invented her enemies Lennox and Malcolm and Macduff in her madness.

Perhaps she had invented the Doctor, too.

After all, she couldn't clearly remember her past life anymore, if there had ever been one. She couldn't recall past smiles and tears, loves and losses, victories and defeats. Perhaps she had been by herself in this room since the beginning of eternity, with nothing but the silence, the darkness . . . her paralleling to _Macbeth_.

And the Voice.

The Voice that wasn't there . . .

"_Have you consigned to talk to me yet, Sarah_?"

She snorted, and gazed dejectedly at the wall just over her left shoulder. "I'm trying my absolute hardest to ignore you, as a matter of fact."

He sounded genuinely offended. "_I'm very sorry to hear that. I am only trying to help, you know. I am only trying to make you happy again_."

"You could be bloody Florence Nightingale for all I care. I'm not talking to a voice in my head. Nice, naughty, or otherwise."

He sighed, a light, floating sound like a C flat on a soprano saxophone. "_I like to think I am a little more than that to you. I like to think of myself as your friend_."

"You're not my friend!" She yelled, pounding her fist against her forehead. "You're not even real for God's sakes! You've been growing in my head like an aneurism. You used to be weak, barely audible. Now I can't shut you up! I may be going mad, but that doesn't mean I'm going to take it without a fight! You're my enemy."

"_Sarah, I mean you no ill will. Honestly." _He was pleading, almost desperate_. "I know this has been very difficult for you. I know that I represent a consequence of circumstance which you would much rather leave undisturbed. But giving in to an aspect of one's own persona, no matter how negative it is perceived in your own state of mind, need not necessarily be detrimental._"

"If I accept you, it means I've accepted madness." She spat. "I'm not crazy. I am perfectly, absolutely, unequivocally sane. In agony, maybe. Starving, probably. Pitiful and devoid of all hope, almost absolutely. But most definitely sane!"

"_That is my point, my dear. You are coping with trauma and incomprehensible loneliness, with burdens no man or woman or child should have to bear. And you are doing this by inventing me. It is nothing to be frightened or ashamed of. Rather, it is a sign that you are fighting to keep those who would wish you harm from overwhelming your resolve. You are finding strength within yourself, within the confines of your own beliefs and your own sense of morality. I am your friend, your ally, and I will continue to grant you strength in these dark times. You have nothing to fear while I am here. I offer an escape, out of time, out of space . . ._"

"But I'm not crazy! If you want to help me, then go away! You say I don't have anything to fear from you, and yet funnily enough I'm terrified out of my wits!"

"_I'm going to be honest_." He replied candidly, "_You need me as much as I need you. We are symbiotic creatures, you and I; you feed off of me and I feed off of you. We give each other the strength needed to survive. You give me life, and in return I grant you a reprieve from this hellhole of desolation_."

"_So what if I am a facet of your subconscious? So what if I am nothing more than a figment of your damaged imagination? Maybe you're going mad. Maybe you've gone mad already; I'm not sure, just as you're not sure. I am only consciously aware of what you yourself know to be the facts, and the matter of your sanity is a very abstract, intangible fact indeed_."

"I don't want to be the woman in the rubber room." She whispered, burying her head in her hands. "I don't want to be my own King Macbeth."

"_If you are King Macbeth, Sarah Jane, then would that make me Hecate, Goddess of Magic, Queen of the Witches?_"

"If you like. But wasn't Hecate a woman?"

"_Just as you give me existence, you give me voice. I am what I am, and what you make me to be. I and Hecate may have many guises._"

"Hecate was the leader of the witches, the one who poisoned Macbeth's mind, twisting his sense of self-empowerment until his own perceived immortality led to his downfall. Yes," Sarah snarled vehemently, "I think you'd make a very apt Hecate indeed!"

"_You are impossible, Sarah! In all this time, during this entire ordeal, have I ever lead you astray? Have I ever betrayed you? Just because you view me as a stigma . . ."_

"Stigma? _Stigma! _Damn right you're a stigma! I don't _want_ you to give me strength! I don't _want _to stand up and fight Doctor Lennox anymore! I don't _want_ to be Sarah Jane Smith, the woman who never gives up and never backs down! Damn it all, in fact. Damn it all to hell!" She roared, "I just want it to be over! I wish they would kill me, or beat me senseless so I don't have to sit here for all eternity stewing in my own madness and my own agony anymore. I just want it to be over! Finally, completely, over!"

"_**He** would be disappointed in you, Sarah_." The voice said sadly.

"Shut up." There was such malice, such extreme hate in her words, that the voice in her head was momentarily shocked into silence. "Don't you dare mention that son of a bitch's name to me."

"_The DOCTOR_!" The voice shrieked, resolve snapping, "_The Doctor the Doctor the Doctor the Bleeding DOCTOR!_"

"Shut up! I hate him! I _hate _him!"

"_The Doctor would scream at you to do everything in your power to fight Doctor Lennox and escape! And what do you do? Sit here and wish for death! You are not the woman the Doctor cared for!_ _You are but a shadow of his Sarah Jane_, _an insult to her memory_!"

"I am a shadow!" Sarah yelled, "He left me here, didn't he? I kept that bloody TARDIS key! I held out hope that he would save me, and I think Lennox let me keep it because he wanted the Doctor to come! But he didn't, did he? The Doctor is dead to me now! And I died with him."

The voice, her Hecate, was about to answer, when the door appeared.

The door that was not there.

Sarah's eyes widened. Forgetting her anger and her hate for the man who had abandoned her, she curled herself into a ball and retreated further into the dark corner of the room. She hugged her thin knees to her chest, and tried to make herself as small as humanly possible.

The door opened, and Doctor Lennox walked in. He smiled a brilliant smile, trying to portray a warm, cozy exterior which made Sarah shiver with absolute dread.

"Hello, Miss Smith." He greeted her brightly, his voice thick and syrupy like cough medicine, "I heard you screaming again."

"You heard nothing, you bastard." She said croakily into her filthy shirt.

He tutted, "Let's try to be civil, my dear. I also heard you mention the Doctor, unless I was much mistaken . . ."

"You were."

" . . . and I'm sure I was not. Does this mean we're willing to talk about him?"

"Ha!" Sarah chuckled, a ravaged sound that hurt more than she had expected, "The Doctor may be a traitor to me, but there's no way I'll ever give him over to the likes of _you_."

"That really is a pity." He didn't sound very upset. "I thought your . . . alone time, would have provided some manner of self-inflection that would have allowed you to see some reason. There is no point in prolonging your suffering, Miss Smith. Not for the likes of the Doctor. Not for the likes of a man who left you to _my_ devices."

"Go to hell." She muttered.

"No, Sarah. That's where _you're_ going." Lennox stuck his head out of the door, beyond the Time Barrier. "Tell Malcolm to prepare the Dream Room."

Sarah's blood froze. "Wha . . . what?"

"You have brought this upon yourself, Sarah Jane Smith. I can't say I'm sorry, for I do not condone stupidity."

"Do you expect me to _beg_?" She snarled, "I welcome death!"

"You know that Malcolm is not going to kill you, my dear." Lennox stooped down, until he crouched at Sarah's eye level. She backed further into the corner, trapping herself as he whispered, almost intimately, in her ear, "He is going to keep you _alive_."

Sarah closed her eyes, keeping the tears from falling and locking the screams of utter despair bottled in the back of her throat. She would not give Lennox the satisfaction of seeing her pain.

"Just get on with it." She whispered, "I will be dead before long, anyway. But before I die, I want you to know something: I am not the Doctor. I will never _be_ the Doctor. Ever."

* * *

"And unlike the Doctor, I would rather die than betray my friends."


	5. Chapter 4: Tea At The End Of The World

September 30th, 1986

South Croyden, London, England, Planet Earth

* * *

Sarah carefully spooned some granule sugar into her teacup, not for a moment tearing her eyes away from the stranger sitting smack-dab in the middle of her settee. Sarah had gladly given up her usual spot; she herself was sitting cross-legged on a kitchen stool she'd dragged in from the other room, as far away from cricket boy as manners would permit.

She cleared her throat, trying to be civil. "Can I get you a cup of tea, Mr. Chesterton?"

She immediatly chomped down on her tongue. _Oh_,_ you are so British, Sarah_. _No idea who this fellow is, and you're offering him tea_.

"No thank you."

She raised an eyebrow. "You're sure?"

_And now I'm insisting. And now he's going to accept and help himself to biscuits and watch the football match and never going to go away . . ._

"Quite sure." Chesterton refused her offer a second time with a bright, winning smile, as if that cleared everything up. He went right back to staring at his white trainers. Sarah may as well have never opened her mouth.

"Suit yourself." She grumbled, and sipped her lukewarm brew. She swallowed, and regarded the young man in cautious silence.

Not a word passed between them for some time. Chesterton continued to take a keen interest in his spotless shoes, while Sarah tried to piece together exactly how she had come to be playing host to a rather attractive young man, who may or may not have been completely bonkers (he _was_ wearing what appeared to be a bright green celery stalk on his lapel), and had wiggled his way into her home by doing little else except throw a few names around.

At any rate, sane or insane, he had caught her undivided attention.

"Is he okay?" Sarah asked out of the blue.

Chesterton, finally, glanced up from his all-consuming shoe fascination. "Beg pardon?"

"The Doctor. Is he alright?"

"I'm not entirely sure . . ."

"Probably in trouble up to his bulgy blue eyeballs, knowing him. Why else would you be here?"

"_Bulgy blue eyeballs_ . . ." Chesterton muttered hotly to himself, frowning. He looked as though he was about to offer a rebuttal, but then he wandered back into his own thoughts again, leaving Sarah's questions unanswered.

She was beginning to lose her patience. Trust Sarah Jane Smith to get her hopes up regarding the Doctor and then get them dashed to dust by the celery nutter in the cricket gear.

Sarah cleared her throat again, a lot more obnoxiously this time. "Well, Mr. Chesterton? What's this all about? How did you know where to find me? And why bring the Doctor into it?"

Something in her words made him turn his blond head. He answered, and from his tone it was clear that he was no longer distracted. His childlike eyes bore directly into Sarah's own, commanding her attention.

"I sought out a person of an investigative nature knowledgable in the fields of the abstract, and of the extremely dangerous. Of the other-worldly. I was pointed in the right direction by a group of people from an organization called P.R.O.B.E. Their director, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, seemed certain you would be able to help me."

"Of course she would." Sarah huffed in disdain.

Chesterton continued, "There are people out there who would wish this world harm, Miss Smith. Powerful people. Evil people."

"Ah, _great_ . . ." Sarah sighed.

"Events are coming into play, causes and effects acting against the natural order of the universe are very quickly spiraling out of control. Soon, this progression of perverted phenomena will bring about the destruction of the entire world."

"I'm a journalist, not a doomsday peddler!" Sarah slammed her cup onto the saucer, making Chesterton jump. "Yes, there are some evil people in the world doing evil things, day after day, week after week, year after year. But that's the order of things! It's life; it has never changed and is never likely to change. What do you expect _me_ to do about it?"

"_What do I expect you to do about it_?" He asked incredulously, "What has happened to you?"

"People change! I don't know what you think you know about me, Mr. Chesterton, but I can guarantee you're going to be disappointed!"

Chesterton's youthful features fell. He considered her in a light that was almost pitying. His voice was low and sorrowful. "In all honesty, Miss Smith . . . I was informed you were a maverick, a passionate defender of the people and a fighter against the forces of corruption. I was told that you were a woman willing to stand up for her beliefs, no matter the repercussions of her actions. I was told that . . . that you cared."

"You were misinformed, then." Sarah said icily, "I only do what I am asked to do by the _Met_. In real life, there's no room for heroes. 'Now o'er the one half world / Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / The curtained sleep.'"

"_Macbeth_. Act Two, Scene One."

"Yes."

"What happened to make you like this?" He barely managed a whisper. Sarah didn't hear him.

"Look, Chesterton, or whatever your name is." She clarified in no uncertain terms, "I may have spent much of my former life, my _other_ life, sorting out these types of things, but that's not the case anymore. I'm a journalist. I report real-life facts, everyday facts, _normal_ facts. I'm not going stick my neck on the chopping block writing conspiracy theories about universal destruction and the end of all things."

Chesterton looked hurt. "This is not a conspiracy theory Sa . . . Miss Smith. Somehow, someway, the Doctor is of significant importance to these people. And these people, and the institutions under their control, are a very real threat to your home."

"To England?"

"In a sense . . . yes."

"Why not go to the government, then? Secret Service and so on." Sarah asked, "If it's terrorists you're worried about, surely MI-6 would be better suited to deal with the problem then the likes of me. I know some people; I can point you in the right direction."

"No!" Chesterton gave a start, nearly tipping over the coffee table in the process. Sarah scrabbled off her stool and grabbed the table's edge to keep her tea from spilling everywhere. "This involves the Doctor. You know what sort of figure he cuts in society, how . . . _alien _. . . he really is. No, it has to be you. I can't risk drawing to much attention to these matters. I can't risk anyone else getting involved."

Sarah furrowed her brows, and then crossed her arms as she reached an understanding. "Ah, I see . . . you're in trouble of some sorts aren't you, Mr. Chesterton? Except your name isn't Chesterton, is it?"

The stranger's skin tone paled at least 15 shades. He looked physically ill. Laughing nervously, he stuttered, "Erm . . . yes, well . . . silly of course . . . my name is Ian Chesterton . . ."

"You don't need to worry, 'Mr. Chesterton', I won't give the game away. I would never betray the identity of an informant of any kind. Bonkers or otherwise. You can keep the alias if it makes you feel better, though."

"Alias. Yes. Right." He let out a shaky breath, very much mollified, as if the weight of the world had been lifted off his shoulders. "You are a very astute woman, Miss Smith."

"It's my job, Mr. Chesterton. And, typically, strangers who barge into my house, muttering about doom and destruction and the Doctor, are not all that they seem to be." Sarah sighed, gazing heavenward in disbelief at her own curiosity, "Oh hell, who am I kidding? You have officially piqued my interest, sir. What is it you want me to do?"

Surprisingly, his face didn't brighten. He didn't look victorious or smug, as Sarah had expected him to. In fact, he looked downright _sad_. Very sad, and very regretful.

"Does this mean you will help me?"

"In any way I can. Though I assume that you will not want to get directly involved?"

"Naturally."

She cocked her head. "Did you work for these people, these 'evil men' you're describing? If you were a former member of an illegal institution of some kind, are you, personally, in danger?"

He thought for a moment before answering, "Let's just say I would like to keep as low a profile as possible, Miss Smith. Of course, I will provide all the information I can, but I would prefer to remain on the QT, as it were."

"Fair enough. I prefer to work alone anyway." She procured a battered, spiraled notebook and a ballpoint pen from her blouse pocket. "You'd better tell me everything you know, Mr. Chesterton."

"Very well then. Let us begin" He placed his hands on his knees, leant forward, and all but whispered his story, as if he were afraid someone would overhear him.

* * *

"What do you know of a man named Doctor Thaddeus Lennox?"


	6. Chapter 5: Twice Dead

2nd Year of the New Age, 2067

The Cinder of Sol 3

* * *

Very gently, the Doctor removed the loop of metal from around her neck and slipped the remnants of her key into his pocket. Almost immediatly, the telepathic message linked to the TARDIS fell silent, as if an aching soul had finally been put to rest and found its peace.

Then, against his will, the Doctor forced himself to consider her charred corpse swathed in the fog.

He couldn't bring himself to touch her. Perhaps he was a coward, but he feared she would crumble to dust, fade away and be forever lost to him and his memories. He couldn't bring himself to disturb her in her last sleep, no matter how terrible and mind-numbing that sleep was.

"I need to think." The Doctor said stiffly, turning on his heel and leaving the remnants of his dear friend behind, purposely not looking back. Leela darted her gaze between the Doctor and the dead woman, and, in a moment of decision, decided to follow the Time Lord. Her place was by his side, not alone amongst the dead. While he would never admit it, he needed someone.

In solemn silence, the pair made their way back to the TARDIS, which stood out like a neon blue lodestone in the white void. Neither said a word as they drew closer to the time ship that had, over recent months, become their home.

All the while, Leela could feel herself growing concerned about the Doctor. His blue eyes were glazed and unfocused. They lingered on something only he could see, or something only he wished to see, far away in the distance. His motions were rigid and zombie-like as muscle memory alone guided him in opening the TARDIS door. He stepped inside, and Leela had to dash in after him to avoid being left behind on the dead, silent world.

The Doctor had not even registered her presence.

He had all but forgotten her.

Once inside, he darted over to the central console and punched the viewscreen control with a quivering fist. His tall, lanky frame, usually bustling with energy and dashing about doing this and that, stood ramrod still like a shop-window mannequin. Even the nervous jitters he'd had when he found the dead woman were gone. He was breathing deeply, in through his nose and slowly out through his barely-parted mouth, trying to control his limbs. His only movement was the clenching and unclenching of his fist as data began to scroll down the white viewscreen: pictures and figures and temporal scripture that Leela couldn't make hide nor hair of.

Several long, agonizing moments passed. The Doctor continued to stare at his sums, and Leela continued to stare at him. Under normal circumstances, she would have demanded her revenge upon the cowardly slime who had murdered innocents in such a way. She would have stalked through the fog, knife drawn, senses keen, hunting her enemies and ensuring that the last thing their pitiful eyes saw and the last thing they experienced was the rage of the Doctor: the man who had lost someone special in the never-ending field of bodies. She would have gladly slit a thousand throats to avenge the sorrow of her friend and mentor.

But these were not normal circumstances, as Leela was beginning to understand. So _many_ were dead. So many had died without the honor due a warrior. Leela remembered the evil aura permeating the ground, the sense of wrongness, the knowledge that something horrible had occurred that was never meant to happen. She had witnessed destruction like that she had never known before: blind, unfeeling, unthinking destruction. No number of Tesh or Sevateem warriors were capable of such acts. And she knew, in her heart of hearts, beyond the fire of her hunter's instinct, that there had been enough killing. If there was to be any more, it would not start with her.

"This is Earth." The Doctor stated suddenly, gazing at the data on the viewscreen.

Leela shook her head defiantly. "This place did not feel like Earth. Earth does not have an aura of death about it."

His words were clipped and harsh. "Are you going to argue with me or are you going to accept that I may know a little more about spacio-temporal coordinates than you?"

Leela bit her tongue. She knew that the Doctor had not meant to be so rude, but it would have been unfair of her to be angry with him when he had other things on his mind.

Besides, he _was_ right.

"I meant no insult." She said, truthfully. "I am only stating what I have seen with my eyes and felt in my heart."

"Yes." He muttered offhandedly, "Of course you were."

He did not apologize.

"The coordinates of this temporal zone match those of Humanian Era Earth in the mid 21st Century, sometime after the launch of the first manned deep-space missions. The spacial coordinates correspond to somewhere outside . . . London, England!"

"I have been to London." Leela was still skeptical. "This wasteland is nothing like the place I have seen."

"No. You're right. There should be skyscrapers, scientific and medical institutions, thousands upon thousands of vehicles and millions of people living out their day to day lives. There should be a thriving metropolis! But now . . . there is nothing here but, as you say, a wasteland."

"Then what has gone wrong? Why is this Earth, but not Earth?"

"I don't know . . . yet. But I have a nasty suspicion."

The Doctor rotated a dial, and suddenly another picture appeared on the viewscreen, replacing the data regarding the Planet Earth. The file featured nothing more but a few, typed-up side notes, and the faded photograph of a petite, middle-aged woman, still pretty despite her years.

"Sarah Jane Smith." The Doctor elucidated, very quietly, "Born . . . May, 1951, in Foxgrove, Hertfordshire. Died . . . April, 2011, in Southall, London. Of cancer."

"Cancer?"

"An uncontrolled growth of abnormal malignant cells in the body. But that is not what killed the corpse of the woman laying outside. The people outside were all killed by a temporal short-out. In a sense, they are the physical memories of people."

"I do not understand."

"Something, or someone, has been fooling around with time." The Doctor elaborated, "When the Web of Time is altered by the very naive or the very stupid, anyone other than the Time Lords, unanticipated consequences tend to arise. The timeline behind every major event in Earth's history or anywhere else in the universe is held together by the most delicate of temporal ley-lines, like the rope of a cargo net. Disturb the balance, unravel the rope, and entire lives are rewritten, or cease to exist at all. The cargo net spills the proverbial cargo into the sea of entropy."

"Sarah's, and the rest of those poor peoples' lives, were the cargo."

"That does not make sense!" Leela exclaimed, "If Sarah Jane Smith is the woman whose body is out there, then how could she have died in . . . 2011? She cannot be dead twice, and yet at the same time!"

"That's what I assume to be the problem here, Leela." The Doctor snapped. "An innocent woman, my _friend_, has died a horrible, twisted, _agonizing _death. Not only that, but she died in a manner that was never supposed to transpire and, according to the Web of Time, never actually _did _transpire. Earth is little more than foggy, burnt cinder suspended in space. London has been reupholstered in bodies. _And I don't seem to have a single, blind clue as to WHY_!"

The Doctor shouted the last words, spitting them at the console. Leela stayed silent, and then asked, very cautiously,

"Is there nothing you can do, Doctor?"

He yelled back at her, "I don't know what's going on! For all I know, my interference could be what causes the split in the Web of Time in the first place! Something has gone wrong with time, and to take action would be stupid to the point of dim-witted _idiocy_!"

"Did you care about her?"

The question took him by surprise. "What?"

"The dead woman, Sarah Jane Smith. Did you care about her?"

"Care abo . . . Care about her?! She is . . . WAS, the most important person in the universe!"

Leela knitted her eyebrows together in honest confusion. "She could not have been _that _important. Otherwise, she would be here now, with you. Not dead from this _cancer_ thing or from anything else."

The Doctor sucked in his breath. "Do you think I _wanted_ this to happen?" He hissed.

"I do not think you ever mean for anyone to die, Doctor. But die they do, in the end. We are not all gods like you."

"I am not a God." He said sharply, "I'm as fallible as the next man! I'm as old and weak and infernally _stupid_ as the next man!"

Leela shook her head and said solemnly, "No, Doctor. You are not stupid. You are the wisest man I know. But love can turn even the wisest man into a fool."

"Beg your pardon?"

"In my tribe, love is frowned upon. Love clouds the judgement and dulls the senses. Love can be more powerful than even the Tesh, turning the mightiest warrior into a mewling kit who cannot tell the difference between his head and his heart. In the tribe of the Sevateem, love will get you killed."

"But we of the Sevateem also believe in balance. We believe that the soul is constantly at war with itself, and that wisdom fights instinct in a perfectly balanced battle stretching into forever. If the balance is disturbed, if either emotion or reason gains an advantage, then the soul is torn about. I believe your own soul, Doctor, is steeped in wisdom and kindness. You are not an evil man, but your goodness comes from logic alone. You speak of science and this 'Web of Time', but do not allow yourself to accept instinct. I think the reason you are so lonely, the reason you are in so much pain at this moment, is because your soul is unbalanced. You cannot find the still point in your hearts, the point between the light and the dark."

"What are you saying, Leela?" He asked darkly.

"I think it is time you acted like a fool for someone, Doctor." She bowed her head. It truly was not her place to speak in such a way to her teacher, but she couldn't seem to stop herself . . .

"I think that you will find a way to save this Sarah Jane Smith. Not because of logic, but because of instinct. Because, and I can see it in your eyes, you loved her as any friend would."

* * *

"And love has a way finding a light in the dark."


	7. Chapter 6: Aberration

Unknown Date

Unknown Location

* * *

Sarah did not like it when they fed her.

It was a completely undignified, painful ordeal at worst, and infernally bothersome at best. Sarah fought it as best as she could, but of course, dead prisoners are not very useful prisoners, and hunger could destroy even those locked away out of space and time, detached from the normal flow of then to now to next, within the boundaries of the Time Barrier. Lennox would not allow Sarah to escape him through the run-of-the-mill death that starvation inevitably brings. Whether she would talk or not, Sarah had to eat.

Two guards, cookie-cutter stereotypes with big muscles and proportionally small intellects, came in with a catheter and a small, white pill that, from memory, tasted like pressed chalk. According to Doctor Lennox, on the few occasions he had been present during the ordeal, the pill contained the bare elements needed to support life for a short period of time: vitamins A, C, D, E, thiamine, riboflavin, potassium, calcium, iron, and a dozen other essential minerals crushed into a small capsule no bigger than a sunflower seed.

Sarah positively hated the thing.

As the guards corralled her into a corner of her cell, Sarah remembered her heroes, the generation of young women who had fought for equality and universal suffrage through peaceful protest and written scripture. She remembered Alice Paul, protesting even in prison through her hunger strikes in a way more powerful than Sarah's own attempts could ever be. She remembered tales of how they had force-fed Alice at Occoquan Prison, jamming a tube down her esophagus and pumping raw eggs into her stomach.

Sarah Jane remembered them as the guards held her arms, tipping her head back by her choppy hair and holding her jaw open, making her burnt face scream in agony, placing the chalky capsule on her tongue, and pouring stale water into her mouth and throat through the catheter. She remembered them as one of the guards plugged her nose and clamped her mouth shut, choking her until she swallowed.

Sarah remembered the stories of their humiliation and defeat, and in it, she saw her own.

It was only after the guards had left again, only after their footsteps had receded far away into the distance and the door had melted away (or had it?) into the Time Barrier, and only after she had stopped dry-retching, that Sarah allowed some small tears to fall. Tears more of frustration than pain, frustration in the fact that her continued efforts at rebellion were getting her nowhere, that she may as well be beating a dead horse with a stick.

"_You can't keep this up, you know._" A quiet, sympathetic voice told her.

Sarah quickly smacked the tears away with the back of her hand before spitting at the shadows. "Go away, please. I'm really not in the mood."

"_I can't go away._"

The voice was whispering, all but silent as if spoken on barely a breath. It reminded Sarah of voices in a crypt, of a midnight breeze in a graveyard.

It scared her in no uncertain terms.

"Do stop whispering like that!" She barked, "Either speak up or don't speak at all! Preferably the latter!"

"_I cannot_." He answered, "_I can only speak with the voice you have imparted on to me. My being is incomplete, therefore I do not exist much in the sense where I have anything important to say_."

"I'm not mad enough for you, am I?" Sarah said drily.

"_Perhaps_. _I am but a wandering idea, a shadow on the fringes of your thoughts. 'Might be the be-all and the end-all—here / But here, upon this bank and shoal of time / We'd jump the life to come.'_"

"'Jump the life to come' indeed! Don't quote Shakespeare to me . . . whoever you are! You're only gaining strength by sapping my own! Get out. Get out of my head! I don't want you, I don't need you, and I will never, _ever_, go mad enough to dream _you_ into existence! You don't exist, so just _not exist_ already!"

"_I will be back, Sarah Jane._"

"Is that a threat?"

"_I do not make threats. I do not wish to harm you, nor will I ever remotely dream of doing so. I am simply stating an inevitable fact. My time will come, when your time is near it's end_."

The voice went quiet, and Sarah was left alone in the darkness.

At least, until an oily, cultured voice rang out, "Good morning, Miss Smith."

She started, and found Thaddeus Lennox leaning nonchalantly against the wall where the door had evaporated. Sarah wondered how long the man had been standing there, watching her as she sank deeper into schizophrenia. He always seemed to be there, appearing and disappearing like memories of a dream.

"Or is it really morning?" Lennox continued, "In a place such as this, within this fantastical invention of mine, one can never be too sure about the time of day, or the week, or the year for that matter. Is it still today, or an insurmountable number of tomorrow evenings and yesterday afternoons? What was it Albert Einstein said? 'The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion'?"

"What do you want, Lennox?" Sarah asked, too weary and too tired to pay her unwelcome visitor much notice.

"You know what I want, Miss Smith." Lennox looked at her with keen, shocking grey eyes, "The question at hand remains whether or not you're going to give it to me."

"You know the answer to that before you even ask." Sarah sighed, "You're wasting your breath, Doctor Lennox. We both know that I can't tell you what you want to know."

"There is a distinct difference between 'can't' and choosing not to, Miss Smith. You understand that your stubbornness will only prolong further discomfort on your behalf?"

"I am fully aware of that, thank you."

"I do not enjoy torturing you, Miss Smith."

"Could have fooled me."

"What I do enjoy, however, is getting answers when I want them. And if that means referring to Malcolm's particular area of expertise, then so be it."

Lennox lazily stretched himself to his full standing position, pushing himself off the wall. He took his time as he walked towards Sarah, who stood her ground, chin raised, stiff upper lip, refusing to be intimidated. When he stopped, they could have brushed noses. Lennox extended a bony finger and intimately stroked underneath Sarah's right check. He was careful in avoiding the blackened half of her face, one of a few results of Malcolm's 'expertise'.

He murmured, "Is it not a pity that one so beautiful, one so proud, has to suffer the indignity of it all?"

Sarah, a stone sinking to the pit of her stomach, recoiled as if electrocuted.

"Don't touch me." She growled.

"I . . ." Lennox snapped his hand out and grabbed Sarah's upper arm in a grip like a metal vice, " . . . do what I _want_, Miss Smith. And what I want are some answers out of you."

"I won't tell you anything!" She hissed, trying to plot out the pain coursing up her arm. Before she could give herself time to think, Sarah stuck her leg out and kicked up, as hard as she could, against Lennox's groin.

He didn't even flinch.

"Very well, you recalcitrant bitch." Lennox moved his hand from her arm to her throat, and dragged her across the cell like a dog by the scruff of the neck. "I'm sure Malcolm will be very pleased to offer his services once again."

"You don't scare me, Lennox!" Sarah spat, "You won't get anything out of me! _Ever_."

"_Oh, Sarah._" The voice whispered. It sounded as though he were crying. "'_Yet do I fear thy nature._'"

The next few moments were a blur, like jumping from scene to scene in a movie forever on fast-forward. In one minute, Sarah was being herded out of her cell by the brutality of Lennox. The next, in a flash of black and red that sent a roaring headache pulsing through her temples, she was being hauled into the Dream Room by two stoic, unfeeling facility guards.

She was being strapped in, bound and restrained like an asylum patient in the lobotomy chair. No matter what she did, no matter how hard she struggled, Lennox's iron hand on the back of her neck seemed to drain the energy out of her, so her blows fell like weak slaps on the bodies of her captors. She continued to scream like a mad woman as Malcolm emerged from the blinding whiteness: Malcolm in his stained lab coat and half-moon spectacles. Malcolm, with his black eyes that stared at her like a crow's on carrion. Malcolm, who civilly waved Lennox away and prepared the machine hovering dangerously over Sarah's head.

The machine that would not kill her.

There was silence, the calm before the storm. Sarah could feel her heart thumping in her breast, racing itself as the panic began to take hold. She was frightened, more frightened than she'd ever been before. Somehow, she knew it would be worse than the last time. Somehow, she knew the Dream Room would take her . . .

"I will ask one last time, Miss Smith." Lennox looped his hands behind his back and allowed silent Malcolm to prepare the machine. "Who is the Doctor? Who is he _really_? Tell me about his time machine, the TARDIS."

"Lennox, listen to me." Sarah gasped desperately, "I don't know who the Doctor really is. I don't know him the way you wish or the you want me to. What I do know is this: I will never betray him. He was, _is_, my best friend, and I will protect him until the day I die."

"Brave words spoken by a fool, Miss Smith. Goodbye, and do try not to kill too many people, hmm?"

Lennox nodded to Malcolm, whose hands began to fasten the couplings. Sarah closed her eyes, steeling herself, before . . .

* * *

_"Run, Sarah!"_

_Sarah blinked and gawped wide-eyed at the corridor in front of her. The Doctor was bolting around the corner and out of the way, his long legs carrying him out of sight within seconds. It took a moment for her shock to dissipate, and for Sarah to register the presence of two, 6-foot tall lizard-like creatures unholstering their blasters and barreling straight towards her, red eyes burning with unbridled rage._

_"SARAH!" A gravelly voice roared from a ways ahead of her. It was the Doctor's bone-thrumming shout that snapped her back to reality and caused the adrenaline to kick in._

_Before she knew it, Sarah Jane Smith was wheeling around and running after the fading form of the Doctor, tripping over her own feet in her haste to escape the snake-eyed monsters barely a 100 yards behind her. Sarah was a decent athlete, but her fear and her excitement made her a brilliant one as she hugged corners and sprinted down the gloomy corridor like a half-crazed rat in a maze. She tried to keep the Doctor within her sights, but the trailing tassels of that ridiculous, stripy scarf were her only signs that she was on the right track and not getting hopelessly lost in the labyrinthian space station._

_"Wait for me, Doctor!" She cried breathlessly, seriously doubting he could hear her at all. "Don't leave me!"_

_"I'm up here, Sarah!" He called over his shoulder, rolling the first syllable of her name in that classically breathy way of his. She grit her teeth and mumbled venomously to herself,_

_"I know you're up there, you dolt. That's my entire problem!"_

_Sarah rounded another corner, and brought herself to so sudden a stop she went flying into the cold, metal siding of the tunnel wall._

_Ahead of her was the Doctor. Along with some very unwelcome company._

_The Time Lord was being held in a strangle hold, left gasping for breath by the massive Komodo Dragon in battle armour standing behind him. The lizard's blaster nozzle was buried into the Doctor's curly hair, pressed hard against his temple. Sarah took barely a moment to register the scene before she had drawn her own weapon, a confiscated gun from an incapacitated guard._

_"Let him go. Or I will kill you." Sarah said quietly, her voice completely level and calm, as she leveled the barrel of the gun._

_"I think not, human." The lizard king gargled in his crocodilian tongue, "The Doctor is my prisoner. You will drop your weapon and surrender yourself to the mercy of the Zareth Empire, or I will snap his spinal cord from his skull."_

_Sarah may have imagined it, but the scaly monstrosity could have been smiling. He hissed, "Did you really think you and your companion were a threat to me, Emperor Elgan of the Zareth!"_

_"Give me a break. You're nothing but an overgrown skink with delusions of godhood!" Sarah licked her lips. "And there's something else. You control all of your reptilian friends through a low-level telepathic field . . . thingy. The Doctor destroyed the relay in the heart of this station!"_

_"You lie, girl!"_

_"Now, the only thing holding this entire operation together is you, Elgan! Your own control! But if I remove you from the picture . . . what happens to the Zareth then?"_

_"I will break his neck before you can pull that trigger, girl." Elgan tightened his muscular arm, and the Doctor let out a strangled choke. "Drop the weapon."_

_"No."_

_"Then the Doctor dies."_

_Elgan's muscles flexed, and the Doctor began to twitch. Sarah put both hands on the gun and tightened her trigger finger._

_"You will never fire!" Elgan screeched. "You will not see him die."_

_"Sarah . . ." The Doctor could barely speak. His face, once red and bulbous, was now turning a hazardous shade of purple-blue__ from suffocation_. "Shoot the gun."

_"I can't." She whispered so quietly Elgan couldn't hear her. Somehow, the Doctor still could._

_"You have to." He gasped, "The lives of millions are at stake."_

_"You'll die."_

_"I'm not important, Sarah Jane. Please . . . while there's life, there's hope . . ."_

_Something clicked inside, a certainty unlike that she had ever felt before. A knowledge of what had to be done, not just for the sake of herself, but for the sake of the Doctor and the millions of lives depending on what she did in the next few seconds. _

_She murmured, "I love you, Doctor. I won't forget you."_

_"I know, Sarah." He said gently, "I know."_

_Before Sarah's eyes were inundated with tears, she saw the look of concern flash across Elgan's reptilian features. A look of uncertainty, and mounting panic._

_It was the last look that ever crossed the Emperor of the Zareth's face._

_In the small, confined space . . . the shot was like a cannon blast._

_The laser bolt ripped through the armour of the large lizard, and the Doctor's neck snapped like a dead twig in Elgan's dying grasp. Both fell to the metal grating of the corridor in a pile of clothing and limbs. The Doctor, through sheer willpower, rolled his glazed eyes up in their sockets and looked at his companion. With the last vestiges of his strength, he smiled._

_"Goodbye, Sarah."_

_He slowly closed his eyes, and let out a last deep, lingering sigh._

_He was dead._

_"I'm sorry." Sarah sobbed uncontrollably, throwing the gun away with the clatter. She fell to her knees and held her dead friend's hand, now as cold and lifeless at the metal interior of the Zareth space station. "Oh God, what have I done?"_

* * *

"Please," She cried and reeled forward in the Dream Room chair. "No more. Don't make me relive it again."

"We can construct many scenarios, Miss Smith." Lennox explained dispassionately, "In each one, the Doctor dies, and you are the woman who kills him. Oh, you may do it for a good cause in the end, but the sorrow, the guilt, the _pain_ remains the same. In each vision, your unconscious alone tells us what we want to know."

"Put her under again, Malcolm. New trial, now commencing."

* * *

"It will be interesting to see how long it takes to drive you mad."


	8. Chapter 7: A Brownian Bridge

September 30th, 1986

South Croyden, London, England, Planet Earth

* * *

"It all sounds a bit fantastic, Mr. Chesterton. Even for me." Sarah admitted with no small amount of dry skepticism. She could have very well been listening to "The Twilight Zone" for the past hour.

The blond man's face was stony and grim. "Nevertheless, Miss Smith, every word I say is the truth. Thaddeus Lennox presents a clear and present danger to the Planet Earth, its people, and its governments. His undertakings are a twisted abomination of science that must be halted by any means necessary."

Sarah, exasperated, interrupted him, "But you have no proof! You have no logistical data, no experimental notes, nothing! I'm supposed to risk my career and my credibility following up on a story which may or may not have a grain of truth in it!"

"As I've said before, I came to you because I know you will investigate." Chesterton said firmly. "No matter how outlandish the situation is, no matter how improbable, you will get to the bottom of it."

"What about the Doctor? How is he involved?"

"I'm convinced it's him Lennox is after, Miss Smith. Him, or at the very least, his time-space technology."

"The TARDIS . . ." Sarah murmured under her breath.

Chesterton continued, "Thaddeus Lennox is a genius, Miss Smith, brilliant beyond most abilities to comprehend. With an immeasurable IQ and unsurpassed analytical reasoning, his understanding of theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, relativity, and cosmology is second to none. His mind is capable of formulating theories that would put humanity leaps and bounds ahead in their quest to harness time. And from what I know, Lennox has formulated a scheme to do just that . . . on his own terms, _eventus exsisto damno_. The man is planning to construct a device he refers to as a Temporal Recursion Manipulator. He wishes to access eddies in the 4th Dimension which will allow him to manipulate closed-string continuity probabilities in his favor."

"English, please." She grumbled, head aching.

Chesterton seemed annoyed. "I _am_ speaking English, thank you. In other words, Lennox wants access to time, and the ability to mould it to his will. This entire cosmos, or at the very least the history of the human race, is completely dependent upon a few, small decisions or decisive actions which have, over time, affected the development of our people to such an extent that to make any variation from those key choices would have apocalyptic consequences. Franz Ferdinand's decision to go to Sarajevo, Albert Einstein's migration to America, the apple dropping on Newton's head, Lincoln lying about the presence of Confederate dignitaries in the Union: all of these moments and countless others have shaped and affected our history through time, and the very essence of what it means to be human."

"And this Lennox bloke is trying to change all that?"

"Precisely." Chesterton's voice got low, "Imagine the power one could wield, if he could manipulate the very events that define our past. Make Germany win World War II, or Soviet Russia reach the moon first. Or help England quell the American Revolution. A person in possession of such power would be a God among men."

"And this . . . time recursion thingamabob can help Lennox do that?"

"In theory."

"But that's impossible!" Sarah exclaimed, "I'm no physicist, but I'm pretty sure that if I go back and kill my grandfather, I, therefore, would never have been born to kill him in the first place, meaning that I will still be alive to have the idea pop into my head to go and kill him in the past . . . a lot of problems arise very quickly!"

"A very valid point, Miss Smith." Chesterton interlaced his long fingers and considered her with blue eyes.

Very blue eyes.

It was very brief, almost momentary, but something in the air made Sarah pause. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, as if a cold breeze had wound itself around her skin. Something about those eyes, young and old at the same time, both strong as steel and brittle as rice paper.

Sarah Jane Smith felt someone walk over her grave . . .

And, of course, Sarah Jane Smith was being an absolute imbecile.

"A very valid point, indeed." Chesterton hadn't skipped a beat. "Unfortunately, it is a problem that Lennox had foreseen and taken into account. The "Grandfather" conundrum is a classic example of a temporal recursion paradox, a never-ending series of phenomena which both creates and destroys itself. The existence of a paradox is, oddly enough, a paradox in of itself."

"_Double_ time." Sarah was scribbling crazily in her small, spiral notebook. "Two different worlds woven together, but with neither existing in of itself because it _cannot _exist without the presence of the other."

"Precisely." Chesterton beamed, very pleased with her. "Do you know what a brownian bridge is, Miss Smith?"

"I told you, I'm not a physicist."

"It is not physics, but mathematics."

Out of the blue, Chesterton reached out and snatched a page out of Sarah's notebook. Before she could protest, he had procured a ballpoint pen from his cream pocket and was scribbling drawings onto the lined sheet. He was a very good artist, and Sarah was soon entranced.

"A brownian bridge," Chesterton explained as he drew, "is a statistical representation of a recursive plot over a set of defined interva. It is used as a mathematical representation of fractal patterns, like the H-tree plot."

Chesterton had stopped drawing. What had started out as a simple sketch of a perfectly symmetrical letter 'H' had grown, from the top of each parallel vertical, another letter 'H', and from their verticals, more letter 'H's, until near hundreds had sprung exponentially from the single 'H' fractal dominating the page.

"Recursion." Sarah breathed, in awe at the beautiful, complex design.

"Lennox is attempting to cancel out the recursion." Chesterton said, "When one meddles with time, consequences such as the Grandfather paradox occur and recreate themselves, expanding until they encompass all of reality. Engulfing it. Destroying it."

"Lennox's Temporal Recursion Manipulator, once operational, will attempt to isolate the section of space and time he wishes to affect in order to separate its closed-string continuity from the rest of the continuum. The device will serve as both the instrument of Lennox's power, and his shield from the consequences. The perfect weapon. And the Doctor's knowledge of temporal technology is the key to unlocking its power."

Sarah bit her lip, mulling over Chesterton's words. Thaddeus Lennox certainly _sounded_ like bad news. Were it ten years ago, she would have plowed into this story, throwing caution into the wind, delving into the juicy details of the unknown just for the sheer hell of it.

Unfortunately, ten years ago was long since gone. She _wanted_ to believe this good-looking, boyishly enthusiastic young man, but as to how much of his fantastic story was actually true . . .

"How do you know all this, Mr. Chesterton?" Sarah asked.

He seemed to catch himself, as if the question had not occurred to him.

"You can't expect me to believe you just pulled all of this information out of a hat from under Lennox's nose."

"No. Of course, not." He sighed, and admitted softly, "I know all of this, Miss Smith, because I am the one who gave Lennox the information in the first place."

"You!"

"I . . . provided Lennox with the knowledge of temporal physics and astrophysical data. Until quite recently, I was a theoretical cosmologist at Oxford University, and a known associate of the mysterious para-military agent known as Doctor John Smith." Chesterton said thickly.

"You knew the Doctor?"

"Quite well, actually."

"He doesn't bestow that privilege, that blessing, upon very many people, Mr. Chesterton." Sarah snapped, "And you repaid him by selling him out to people like Lennox!"

"I have made my apologies where apology was necessary." Chesterton retorted sharply, "And I am reciprocating for my mistakes by doing what I feel in my heart is the right thing . . . confiding in the one person on this planet who I know can make a difference: you."

Sarah massaged her temples, trying to quell her anger. Chesterton was a textbook example of an overambitious scientist: throwing his lot in with the party promising him fame and recognition only to have his hopes and dreams dashed by morality. How was he to know better? He was not stupid, obviously. But he was very, _very_ naive.

The Doctor would have been disappointed in him.

"Then how can I trust you, Ian Chesterton?" Sarah asked him, "How do I know _any_ of this is true? How do I know you're not betraying my confidence like you betrayed the Doctor's? How do I know you're not lying?"

"Because I never lie!" Chesterton barked. It was the first time the man had raised his voice.

Sarah lowered her eyes. "I had a very good friend who said that to me once. And he lied more than any other person I've ever known. He couldn't _stop_ lying."

"'"Stand not upon the order of your going'. You have to trust me, Sarah. And you have to trust yourself. What is the right thing to do?"

He had quoted _Macbeth_ to her. Old faithful Macbeth, popping up again and again even in the most mundane of times. Except that the time was not mundane at all, as Sarah knew all too well. Life was bits and bobs, hundreds of thousands of infinitesimal moments woven together to create a past, and a present, and a future. What one man did had the ability to shape the actions of the next. Life was a collection of relationships, between the earth and its environment, between people, between birth and the inevitability of death. Life was a beautiful collection of randomness. A beautiful miscellaneous. In its own way, life was its own brownian bridge, its own recursion paradox.

It created itself.

Sarah could create her own future.

"I need to make some phone calls." The journalist said more to herself than to anyone else. "Perhaps Alistair would do me a favor . . . no, he's in Geneva . . ."

She darted her gaze to Chesterton and held him with her stare. "I never want to see you again, Ian Chesterton. If I'm to do this, it has to be alone."

Chesterton inclined his head in acknowledgement, got up off of the settee, and slowly made his way to the door. Sarah kept her eyes glued onto the back of his blond head, but Chesterton did not glance back. Before long, he was out the door and down the street, disappearing into the crowd of Croyden.

"What an odd man . . ."

* * *

When the stranger was alone, he began to cry.

_I am so sorry, Sarah._

* * *

**As a head's up, if anyone wants to know what an H-Fractal looks like (because my descriptions leave much to be desired) look it up in Google because FF doesn't allow links. :(**


	9. Chapter 8: More Than Human

2nd Year of the New Age, 2067

The Cinder of Sol 3

* * *

"You amaze me, sometimes, Leela."

The young woman cocked her head curiously, but her eyes were narrowed in suspicion, weary of the Doctor's dripping sarcasm. "I am only a savage. How can I _possibly_ be of amazement to you?"

The Doctor met her cynicism with equal derision. "Because at times, some of the most enlightened words I've ever heard uttered come out of your mouth, and yet you still insist that the likeliest course of action under such circumstances is to barge in guns blazing."

"When the enemy is at the door, it is not words or compromise that will save your life or the life of your tribe. Words do nothing when compared to a sharp knife, a keen sense, and no mercy towards your enemies." She spoke with absolute certainty, "If we are to act, then it must be with all of our hearts."

"The universe is neither as savage nor as primitive as your own world, Leela." The Doctor said, exasperated, "Not all problems can be solved through killing. Look at what happened to all of those people out there. Look at Sarah. _That's_ the result of your form of bloody diplomacy. Death, and more death, and then _more_ death! It's a never-ending cycle that will never abate itself through the action that created it in the first place!"

Leela knew the Doctor's meaning. She remembered how she had felt as she walked upon the hellish Planet Earth, and she lowered her head in shame.

"I have come to realize that, Doctor. There has been too much death in this place." Leela looked at him intently, "I know I am primitive. I know I am a savage. I am proud of what I am, and I trust in my own knowledge, no matter how small you think it is. But if this . . . 'cycle' of death is started by taking life, then is it not broken by saving life?"

The Doctor shook his wooly head. "I can't do what you're asking me to do, Leela."

"Why not? You are wise, you will find a way."

"Meddling with time is no simple matter." He argued, "There are outcomes to be weighed, temporal paradoxes to unwind, and millions upon millions of consequences to take into account across _all_ of time and space. The matter is bigger than you or me or even Sarah Jane."

"But is it so big that we can do nothing?"

"The Laws of Time are the Laws of Time, Leela." He sighed, and lowered his head. "A _Time Lord_ is sworn to uphold them."

"And that is a bunch of Horda dung." Leela said firmly. "Never before have you obeyed the Time Lords willingly. You would not start now."

The Doctor held her with his stare, freezing her to the spot. Without tearing his eyes away, he began to input commands into the TARDIS console. His hands seemed to have a mind of their own, flying around the underside of the time rotor with almost mechanical delicacy, despite the Doctor's thoughts being elsewhere.

Leela feared she had said too much.

"What are you doing?" She asked, too nervously for her own liking.

The Doctor, out of the blue, lowered his eyes to the console and cracked a massive, toothy smile. "Why, I'm going to save Sarah, of course. Who exactly do you take me for, a Time Lord to follow rules?"

The ship started to dematerialize, and Leela couldn't help but smile along with her mentor, and take a sort of personal satisfaction in her own small contribution to his undertaking.

It was then that the TARDIS started to scream.

The ship rocked violently to the right, throwing her occupants against the far left wall. Leela clapped her hands over her ears, crying out in surprise and pain as the TARDIS's shrieking whine cut its way into her ear canal. Before long, the Doctor's own cries joined those of his TARDIS. Their screams mingled as both were racked with unbearable torrents of pain and terror. It brought the Time Lord to his knees. The brims of his wide hat were jammed over his ears in an effort to silence the terrible telepathic laments of his time ship, and the shock and agony they both shared. The hat couldn't help; the noise was within the Doctor's mind, reverberating around his brain and stabbing at his hearts like billions of shards of chipped, dirty glass. Leela scrunched her eyes shut and braced herself against a roundel, preparing herself for the worst.

Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped.

The silence that followed the screams was thick and unruffled, tangible like inky, suffocating soup. The curtain of utter quiet was broken only by an occasional, mechanical groaning echoing from far far away, deep within the belly of the TARDIS. As the silence deepened, Leela thought it safe to open her eyes . . .

"_No_!" The Doctor cried out from somewhere in the darkness, "Whatever happens, _do not_ open your eyes!"

"Why not?" Leela demanded. She hated not being able to see. The choking dark had all but deadened her other senses.

The Doctor's had opened his own eyes, but immediately wished he hadn't. Even to his superior mind, the vision in front of him gave him the mother of all migraines. It would have driven any lower life form mad on the spot. What he saw made his head swim with disbelief, nausea, and an overwhelming lurch of vertigo. He voice was small and squeaky when he croaked out . . .

"I think there's something the matter with the TARDIS, Leela."

In actuality, the Doctor couldn't think of a better way to describe what he saw. Where a console, time rotor, hatstand, and a dozen other bits and bobs had been before were now gone. The solid forms of the roundled walls had faded away into the depths of long begone reality, replaced by rows upon rows of shining, cyan grid lines, like an incredibly detailed X-Y-Z plot.

The grid-work stretched and merged with the infinite gloom far in the distance. It mapped the edges of the former TARDIS interior; billions and billions of cross-hashings and glowing, twisting geometric patterns formed walls and ceilings and corridors in perfect mathematical precision and harmony. They warped and reevaluated themselves in synch with the shifting temporal coordinates; whole equations of structure calculated and recalculated themselves as the TARDIS floated though the Time Vortex.

The Doctor could see the naked form of the transcendental dimensions of his TARDIS.

He could see Eternity.

"Don't open your eyes, Leela." The Doctor said again. "If you value your sanity."

There was something in his words that muted Leela's protests dead in her throat. The dark and the silence and the sensation of disconnection disturbed her. She could no longer feel the floor of the TARDIS beneath her feet. Her hands groped around in the shadows, but found nothing but misty emptiness. The air felt like morning dew, coating her chilled skin like a blanket. She could not feel the comforting firmness of the console room walls, though Leela had been bracing herself against them not a second before.

Out of sheer curiosity, she made the mistake of taking a step forward. With a cry of alarm, Leela's booted feet lost their purchase and fell through the air. Her stomach rolled as she felt herself falling, falling, falling . . . . . .

Even when she was sure she would plummet to her death, far below, Leela did not open her eyes. She soon discovered she could not feel the cold wind whipping her hair, or the air rushing past her ears as she fell. In fact, she could still hear the Doctor's deep breathing, like far-off thunder in the forests back home.

She had not moved. She was falling while standing perfectly still.

Leela had learned to take strange elements of the universe in her stride. The Doctor had taught her tolerance and encouraged acceptance, but there were some things, some sensations, that were simply too alien for her to understand.

For the first time in her life, aboard the nether-TARDIS, Leela was frightened.

"Doctor, what is this?" Her voice was small. For one scary moment, she didn't think the Doctor would answer her, that she would be forever alone in this place of darkness . . .

"Something has peeled the TARDIS's exterior shell away." He rumbled, "I'm staring point-blank at the heart of the mathematical structure of the ship."

"Is that bad?"

"This has never happened before." The Doctor chuckled nervously, "I can honestly say I have no idea! I can't imagine it has any _immediate_ benefits. The sight of complex, sentient temporal equations would drive most people 'round the bend."

Leela frowned, "'Round the bend'?"

"Mad. Insane. Psychotic. Loony. _Non compos mentis_."

"Oh. But this has not happened to you?"

"My mind is especially exceptional, Leela." There was more than a hint of smug pride in his voice. "The question at hand, I think, remains to be who is responsible. The thought of someone invading the outer shielding of my TARDIS on a whim and affecting its configuration on a scale such as this makes my hair curl."

"_Hello, Doctor._"

The Time Lord yelped in a very effeminate manner, and wheeled around in surprise.

There was a stranger in the TARDIS, and a very sinister one at that. A very tall, very thin man had elongated out of the grid-work, melting into form from the strings of pure mathematics. He looked if nothing else like a scruffy college professor, clothed in khaki and tweed with a ballpoint pen in pocket to boot. He reminded the Doctor of a younger Carl Sagan, if it were not for the fact that the man's cozy exterior was offset by his wicked, crooked physiognomy.

His nose, elongating from the center of his gaunt face, was beaky and hooked like a bird-of-prey's. He had a thin-lipped mouth pulled back into a sneer over rows of small, unnaturally even teeth. His eyes were steely grey, sitting in hooded sockets like two playing marbles filled with storm clouds. His tiny pupils flicked over the Doctor, and eyed him like a hungry dog does a dying man.

The Doctor, spotlighted under the stranger's intense gaze, suddenly felt very nervous.

"Is this your doing?" He gestured around the TARDIS interior, trying to sound braver than he felt. For both Leela's sake . . . and his own.

"_Do you like it_?" The stranger asked. He spoke smoothly, his voice powerful and eloquent like Vincent Price's. "_To shackle one's time vehicle, a being of sentient transcendentalism, to the restricting veneer of a chameleon circuit is insulting to its nature. Wouldn't you agree_?"

"I liked her as she was, thanks all the same."

"_Oh. So this 'it' is in fact a 'her'. Interesting_."

"Why?"

"_Any information from you is important to me, Doctor. I have waited so long for this moment_." He smiled, an ebony slit across his pale features, "_I have waited so long, to meet you at last_."

"You have me at somewhat of a disadvantage, I'm afraid." The Doctor beamed, "You obviously know who _I_ am, but I haven't had the pleasure . . ."

"_Doctor_! What is going on?! Who are you talking to?!"

Leela could sense something was the matter. She had drawn her knife from its sheath, and was aiming it in the general direction of the stranger. Something in his voice, his very _being_, caused her skin to prickle with dread. A heavy presence of evil and foreboding hung in the air, the same evil that had choked her on the devastated remains of Earth, amid the fields of blistered corpses.

She could not see, but Leela sensed the Doctor was in danger.

Severe danger.

The Time Lord desperately tried to hush his companion, hoping to keep her temper down and out of notice of the stranger, "Nothing to worry about, Leela. Nothing at all."

It wasn't very convincing.

Brandishing her weapon, Leela barked, "He should not be here! I sense evil about him, and if it is _he_ who has done this to the TARDIS, then he is a threat and must be slain!"

The stranger scowled in contempt, "_You should muzzle your bitch, Doctor; she could bite someone_."

The Doctor bristled, eyes flashing.

"Talk again, creature." Leela called out angrily, "I will find you and slit your throat!"

"_I would take great pleasure in seeing you try_." He whispered, eyeing Leela hungrily. The stranger took a step toward her . . .

"Leave her alone." The Doctor ordered, "Leela, put that knife away, stay still and keep quiet."

"Doctor . . ."

"**Do it**."

She grumbled something unintelligible under her breath, but did as she was told. The knife went _shunk_ as Leela slid it back into her leather sheath.

_Thank my lucky stars, the girl hasn't opened her eyes yet_, thought the Doctor.

"_At least she's house-trained_." The stranger remarked with amusement.

The Doctor patience reached its inevitable end. "What is your business here? Who in the name of Rassilon _are_ you?"

The stranger clicked his pillbox teeth. "_My name . . . my name . . . it has been a very long time since anyone has asked me that. A long time for both of our relative perspectives on time, Doctor_."

"Don't insult me by comparing your longevity to mine. You're only human."

The stranger, if anything, seemed insulted. "_You are very quick to make such an assumption_."

"It's obvious." The Doctor replied drily. He tapped his right ear, and said, "I can hear your cardiovascular system. _One_ heart, with your left ventricle pumping oxygenated blood to the rest of your body, beating at approximately 83 beats a minute. A little fast if we want to nit pick, but then again, I imagine your dander's a bit up at the moment."

"_I am far more than human_!" He snarled.

"If you're not human, I'm a Zygon." The Doctor affirmed. He couldn't help but smile, "I'd recognize that self-absorbed arrogance so characteristic of your species anywhere."

"_I am MORE than human_!" He roared. His brutal face was florid red, like an overripe tomato. He raised his fist, as if to strike the Doctor. His hand hung suspended in the air, until, slowly, he tugged his tweed lapel in a gentlemanly fashion and brought his hands down to his sides.

"_Long ago, in another life, I _was_ human. I was a beautiful mind among the random miscellaneous. A wolf amongst sheep, destined to be more than what any mortal life could grant me_."

The Doctor sighed rather melodramatically, "It's the same story told a hundred times by every megalomaniac from Stalin to the Master. And I can assure you; I've heard all the versions multiple times before."

"_The difference between me and them, Doctor, is that I succeeded_." The stranger opened his arms, "_I have built my own power from nothing. I was human, a long time ago, but now I am become he who can strip apart a TARDIS on a whim, he who can bend time to his will, he who can rival even the Doctor in his mastery over space and time!_"

The Doctor unconsciously bunched his fists within his coat pocket. "So it was you who killed all of those people? You destroyed the Time Line for nothing more than _bragging rights_?!"

"_People are disposable when the destiny they are helping to build is greater than the sum of any few men_!"

"**You killed Sarah**!" The Doctor roared. Leela flinched. "In science and morality, the ends _never_ justifies the means, especially when the means include the mass butchery of innocents and leaving their bodies strewn about the devastated remains of the Earth without so much as a proper burial! You murdered my friend just to meet me in the eye, so I'm asking you one last time . . . who are you?"

The stranger didn't seem put off by the Doctor's rage. If anything, he seemed empowered by it. When he smiled again, it was sadistic and hungry.

* * *

"_My human name, long ago . . . was Thaddeus Lennox_."


	10. Chapter 9: Dreams And Sleepwalks

Unknown Date

Unknown Location

* * *

_Sarah spat some wet mud off of her tongue, and turned to face the Doctor crouching beside her. His ragged brow was furrowed in consternation, his curly hair matted and flattened by his coniferous-green brodie helmet. His face was filthy; the Doctor had to brush his own fair share of grime out of his bleary eyes just to see a meter ahead of him. And he could tell by Sarah's blank expression that she couldn't hear him; his words were little more than buzzing background noise amidst the rapid-fire hail of machine gun fire and the explosive concussions of long-range artillery shells._

_He leaned closer to her and shouted even louder. His voice vibrated irritatingly against her temple, but at least Sarah could hear him clearly . . . _

_"Corporal Whitley's regiment has come back!" _

_Sarah shot her gaze over her shoulder. She could see Whitley, the young Welsh corporal, and a few of his squaddies scrabbling over the lip of the trench a few meters to her left. The boys were beat up, muddy, bloody, but alive. It took the girl a few moments amid the flying chaos to realize something was wrong . . . the group looked slightly smaller than it should . . . _

_"Where's Benton?" Sarah asked, worry whittling its way into her voice. _

_The Doctor shook his head, but began to chew anxiously on his lower lip._

_"Private Smith! Doctor Smith!" Whitley had caught site of them and was scurrying over. His young face was stormy, his eyes darting and unfocused._

_"What is it, man?" The Doctor tipped the brim of his brodie higher to better see the other soldier. "Where's Sergeant Benton?"_

_"The Sergeant's gone an' put a foot in 't, Doctor." Ben Whitley reported stoutly, his strong accent lacing his words, "Stepped in a lan' mine, he did, there can't be much left of 'im."_

_"Damn." Sarah muttered to herself._

_"What happened to the rest of your company, Corporal?" The Doctor asked urgently, "General Haig ordered a no quarter, no retreat advance."_

_"We were bein' massacred, Doctor. Cut down like saplin's!" Whitley protested, "The eastern edge o' No Man's Land, a few meters out from our southern defensive front, 'as been tripped with wire an' mines! Benton tried to break the line an' . . ."_

_"I see your point." The Doctor said grimly. He didn't need to hear the grizzly details. He'd seen and been responsible for treating similar cases only too often._

_"Not just 'im, neither! Akins, Daniels, Ashcliffe, Duehurst, all down! The Huns 'old a position leveled a good 50 meters into No Man's Land across from where I'm talkin' to ya now. They set up sniper nests; we came under 'eavy fire an' had to order a retreat."_

_The Doctor absorbed this, and commanded, "Mind your position, Corporal. Don't bring yourself to Haig's attention and see if you can push that German bulge back!"_

_"Aye, Doctor." Whitley gave a messy salute and sloshed over to the rest of the soldiers propped against the top of the trench._

_The Doctor turned to his companion. "This is not good, Sarah."_

_"Couldn't Whitley and company bring Benton over the line?"_

_Before the Doctor could reply, a tactfully-placed artillery shell rocketed into the muddy ground not 200 yards away, smack in front of a small magazine shed. The blast that followed rattled Sarah's teeth in her skull. Dirt and debris and suspicious lumps which Sarah dared not think about went flying everywhere, burying the men up to their ankles. She could hear them screaming; full-grown soldiers crying for their mums like small children, reduced to utter helplessness in the Hell that had grown around them in the mud. _

_Despite it all, Sarah kept her nerve. There had been a time when the assaults would positively petrify her with panic, when the suffering would drive her mad with grief. But now, they registered no more emotionally than a scuffed knee after falling off a bicycle. Whether Sarah wanted it to or not, her heart had turned cold, stony, and indifferent. _

_It was the only way to survive in a place like this._

_As shrapnel flew through the air, the Doctor put a paw on the roof of Sarah's helmet and shoved her head lower, almost face-first into the mud. Amid so much pointless carnage, some things would never change: the Doctor would always try to be the hero._

_"I don't think Whitley had much of a choice!" The Doctor looked worried as he shouted, "A large group like that would have been sitting ducks for the German nests! He had to leave his Sergeant or risk mutual destruction! There's only one thing left to be done . . ."_

_Sarah, much to her dismay, knew exactly what that meant. "Oh, no. No no no no, don't even think about it!" _

_"We have to get Benton back."_

_"How, exactly, are we going to do that?!" Sarah asked in exasperation, "This is the Somme for pete's sake! What are we going to do: skip into No Man's Land and piggy-back him out?!"_

_The Doctor narrowed his eyes. "Don't be so derisive. Besides, Benton is the one soldier we have to protect. We have to save him! John Benton's grandfather cannot and _**does not**_ die at the Somme!"_

_"Doctor, even if we do survive being riddled with bullets, suffocated in the mud, tangled in barbed wire, blasted to pieces by shell or land mine, or both, all while carrying a wounded man a good 200 meters, we'll still be court-martialed and shot for insubordination by General Haig!"_

_"Do you have a better idea?!"_

_"Yeah . . . let's keep all of our limbs where they belong!"_

_"Sarah!" He scowled, then he said, "I'm going to fetch him. You stay here and keep your head down."_

_Sarah snorted in a most unladylike manner. "To hell I am!"_

_"I beg your pardon!"_

_She rolled her eyes. "You need me! You can't slog through the mud with an injured soldier on your own. You'd be a sitting target, and then it'd be pants for me, wouldn't it? Stuck in World War I disguised as a male nurse private for the rest of my life! Face it Doctor; I'm not letting you out of my sight!"_

_The Doctor didn't like it, but he couldn't argue with Sarah's logic. He would need help . . ._

_"Just stay low and move quickly, for Rassilon's sake." He peeked over the lip of the trench, "Come on. The barrage has abated somewhat and the fog should provide a little cover."_

_Sarah didn't need telling twice. Levering her elbows on the top of the dark, slippery embankment, she gave a mighty heave and lifted herself out of the trench. She went first, her Enfield III loaded and brought to bare in front of her chest. The Doctor, even at a time such as this, went armed only with his surgeon's bag. With him tight on her heels, the two friends barreled head-down into the twisted decimation that was No Man's Land._

_Sarah tried to ignore the **tatatatatatatatat** of machine gun fire as she darted over soggy potholes and avoided the fallen bodies of both British and German soldiers. Her only concern was in protecting the Doctor; the fog provided decent cover as they kept their eyes peeled for Sergeant Benton the elder. _

_The air was damp, and the moisture in the ground was soaking into Sarah's combat boots. She could feel the tips of her feet and hands growing numb with cold, but she did not slow. Crossing a mere 200 meters seemed to take a small eternity as they fought to navigate through the twisted barbed wire covering the mountainous ground. _

_All the while, Sarah Jane Smith was praying._

_She found herself muttering words seeking guidance and protection, for both herself and the Doctor. She found herself remembering Aunt Lavinia's small doses of scripture, and she found herself clinging to the remnants of a faith whose flame had gutted and died long ago._

_What had happened to her and the Doctor? Never before could Sarah have imagined herself totting an Enfield rifle and killing members of her own species, crouching in the cold mud for months on end as the godforsaken war dragged on._

_As she and the Doctor ran and searched for their fallen comrade, Sarah wondered what it was that had gone so terribly, terribly wrong._

_A shadow flew through the fog up ahead, twisting it into a nameless shape. It broke Sarah immediatly from her reverie as, body before mind, instinct before intuition, she stopped and dropped to the ground. Sarah felt rather than heard the Doctor do the same behind her._

_Not a moment too soon, for Sarah felt her hair ripple under her brodie as a small grenade hurtled past her ear and detonated just off her left shoulder. The fire from the blast, and the searing chunks of debris heated by the ammonium nitrate, engulfed her left side with shrieking pain. Sarah shrieked, but desperately rolled over in the mud to put the fire out from her uniform. It did the trick, and despite the agony coursing over her cheeks and her eyes, Sarah knew it could have been a lot worse._

_"Sarah!" The Doctor stumbled forward and took her face in his hands, scanning her features with the utmost concern. His motions were feather-light and gentle, but still Sarah bellowed when his hand ghosted the left side of her face._

_"You're hurt." He said softly. He didn't look like he wanted to believe it._

_"Tell me something I don't know." Sarah muttered darkly, trying to be brave, "3__rd__ Degree burn; I've treated it dozens of times before. I'll live, so long as it doesn't get infected. It doesn't hurt much now."_

_"That's because the nerve endings have been seared through, Sarah."_

_She ignored him, got to her feet, hefted her rifle and turned so the Doctor couldn't see the leathery, blackened half of her face. "Come on. We have to keep going."_

_"But . . ."_

_"Come **on**."_

_The two trudged on, lowering their pace as they reached the edge of the mine field. They treaded soundlessly, barely daring to put any pressure on the ground for fear of more land mines. . ._

_"There he is!" The Doctor pointed. A large man, positively caked in thick, grey mud, lay curled and unconscious in a massive crater. The ground dirt had been flung back in all directions by the force of the land mine. The water pooled at the bottom of the depression was red, the air reeked of black powder and iron._

_Sergeant Benton's left leg was missing at the knee._

_The Doctor was opening his medical bag before he'd even made it to the bottom of the crater, pulling out every strip of cloth and bandage he could lay his fingers on. Sarah covered him, crouching to level her Enfield over the edge of the hole and in the direction of the German line. Her face was almost completely numb now, her left eye could see nothing but milky white halos._

_"He's alive." The Doctor called as he staunched the bloody stump. "But only just. I can't treat him here."_

_"What're we waiting for, then?" Sarah shouldered her rifle, hopped into the crater, and looped her arms under the Sergeant's elbows. With an almighty grunt of effort, Sarah lifted his torso while the Doctor skillfully handled the lad's remaining leg. Together, they hefted Benton out of the hole and back into the thicket of No Man's Land. _

_The way home, and to relative safety, was a mere 200 meters that may as well have been the span of the European continent. Sarah and the Doctor went as fast as they could under the dead weight of Benton. Sarah had completely lost sight in her left eye, and she suspected she was going into shock, but she evaded the concerned glances the Doctor shot her way and trundled onward. She was **not** going to pass out. Not here. Now now._

_Sarah's mind was fogged and unfocused, which was why, when the wind changed direction and began to blow from the south, she didn't register the overwhelming stench of green corn, and she didn't see the light yellow clouds of vapor wafting into the fog._

_It was only when the Doctor let out an anguished cry of alarm did Sarah turn about and see the ungodly horror racing to meet them._

_"Phosgene!"_

_"**That's** why the barrage has stopped." The Doctor eased Benton to the ground and barked, "Get his mask on! And yours, Sarah!"_

_She lowered Benton's prone form and maneuvered the gas mask from around his neck to over his face. Once she ensured his mouth and nose were tightly sealed against the poisonous air, she reached for her own mask . . ._

_It wasn't there._

_Good God, it wasn't there!_

_"I must have lost it when the grenade exploded." She whispered to herself. The words sounded hollow, as if someone else were saying them and she was watching it all like the spectator to some second rate war movie. "It must have come unattached when I hit the ground . . ."_

_She was a dead woman walking._

_"Sarah, take it!"_

_She turned, and found the Doctor right next to her. He had heard her, had torn his own mask off, and was preparing to fix it around her head._

_Every fibre of her being balked._

_"Don't you bloody well **dare**." She snarled, stopping the Doctor's hand, "You have to get Benton back. Humans can survive phosgene poisoning for up to 48 hours; I'll manage until then . . ."_

_"We don't have time to argue. I'm so sorry, Sarah." _

_The Doctor's hands whipped around and braced the back of her neck, immobilizing her. Trapped, Sarah shrieked in protest as the Time Lord brushed his fingertips against her temples . . ._

_Sarah felt the sensation of floating. It was if she were drifting within her body. It was like a dream, a sleepwalk. She had no control, her mind was already muzzy, vision blurred and gloomy. She was barely aware of what was happening, and she was helpless as her frame, a body that was no longer her own relaxed and allowed the Doctor to slip the gas mask over her face. She knew she was doing it, was aware of the effort and the sensation, but she could not stop herself. Slowly, inexorably, helplessly, she was allowing the Doctor to sacrifice his own life._

_"No, you stupid bastard!" Sarah screamed, though no sound came, "You can't do this!"_

_"Now, Sarah." The Doctor gave a sad smile. "Please help me carry Benton back."_

_Her body complied, zombie-like and slow. Sarah's mind was in tears, but her face betrayed only the quiet, quiescent gaze of compliance. Whether she wanted to or not, she and the Doctor were carrying Sergeant Benton back to the British line. _

_Through the deadly phosgene gas._

_It wasn't long before the Doctor started coughing. Deep, chest-wracking coughs that made the ground vibrate. He wobbled as his vision blurred and his great blue eyes turned fuzzy and watery. More than once, Sarah's jellied limbs had to steady him as he doubled over and hacked yellowish phlegm out of his throat._

_By the time the trench was in sight, the Doctor could barely breathe._

_The two of them all but tossed Benton over the edge of the gully and into the arms of some very startled privates. Everyone had donned their masks, looking like a legion of featureless zombies. Everyone, that is, except the Doctor._

_His telepathic hold on her mind and body began to wear off as his strength waned. Once she had regained control of her own autonomic functions, Sarah bellowed, "SOMEONE FIND ANOTHER MASK!"_

_A short gingery fellow, Gibbs, dashed off. The Doctor tried to prop himself up, but as the adrenaline that had kept him going out on No Man's Land wore off, he collapsed to the muddy bottom of the trench._

_"No. No no no no no no no." Sarah's fingers fumbled with the straps of her gas mask, but the Doctor's hand caught her's and stopped it with a grip strong enough to bend steel._

_"Don't. Please." He whispered hoarsely. His voice was weak and watery. _

_Sarah knew the symptoms of phosgene poisoning, especially that of this high a concentration; the fluid was already in the Doctor's lungs. She didn't know how quickly phosgene affected Time Lords, but one thing was for sure: he was dying, drowning from the inside._

_"This is all my fault." He murmured, "I never wanted you here, Sarah. I never meant for this to happen . . . I'm so sorry . . ."_

_"You can't blame yourself for everything." Sarah soothed, "You do your best to mend the universe, but sometimes the universe doesn't care enough about us to return the favor. '__Let us seek out some desolate shade and there w__eep our sad bosoms empty'. We just do the best we can, and that's the only thing you should expect of yourself . . . Doctor? Doctor!"_

_His glassy eyes stared ahead, fixated on the bleeding sky._

_He was dead._

* * *

She awoke, and faced Lennox. Her voice was stony and hard when she asked, "What are you hoping to accomplish through this?"

"We're hoping these traumatic experiences will convince you to give us the information we require, Miss Smith." Lennox answered reasonably enough. "Or, at the very least, stimulate your unconscious in such a way as to indirectly give us said information."

Sarah felt incredibly tired and drawn when she attempted to lift her head. Her body ached, and her limbs seemed finer and thinner, more weak. For all of her knowledge, she could have very well been fighting World War I.

"If you want to know more about the Doctor, how do you know the details about him to be able to put him into these dreamscapes? Why do they seem so real?"

Lennox seemed genuinely pleased by her question. "We make them real, Miss Smith. While in your last . . . nightmare, the left side of your face was burnt by the ignited ammonium nitrate of a German grenade, correct?"

"Yes."

"And before you and the Doctor were deployed, you were forced to cut your hair in order to pass as a male nurse private, correct?"

"Yes . . ."

"Feel your face, Miss Smith." Lennox breathed, "The Dream Room, as I have said before, is a completely _immersive _experience. The dream, as you might say, outlives the dreamer."

Malcolm carefully released the restraints, so Sarah could slowly lift a hand to brush her left cheek, run a hand through her hair . . .

There was barely any of it left! Her locks had been roughly hacked off near her ears, as if with a pair of scissors.

And the left side of her face was pockmarked and scorched, and brought searing agony when she touched it.

* * *

Sarah couldn't help it; she screamed.


	11. Chapter 10: Singular Truth

September 30th, 1986

South Kensington, London, England, Planet Earth

* * *

The air was blustery and cold, and surprisingly biting for Southern England in the autumn. Leaves and other debris floated on invisible tendrils of wind, dancing between lampposts and down the busy city streets. Up and down the pavement, other Londoners were wrapped from head to foot in wooly scarfs and coats, looking more than a little annoyed at the unseasonal shift in the weather. They bustled hither and thither on their ways to work and the tube, just as desperate to get where they needed to be as they were to get out of the cold.

Sarah Jane, however, found the autumnal chill rather bracing; she could feel her sinuses opening and her head clearing as she breathed in the cold, fresh air. After months of bumming around her flat and traveling on automatic via the same route to and from work everyday, to veer away from her normal track was enthralling. For a few moments, Sarah could have fooled herself into thinking she was ten years younger, and more than content to seize the day and enjoy the small, beautiful moments while they lasted, putting off the worries of a bigger picture for another day.

But it was a forced mentality, and she knew it. Even the lovely cold air wasn't enticing enough to convince her otherwise. Sarah remained cognizant of her true purpose, and determined to solve this one last puzzle before she threw in the towel for good. She was not investigating out of a greater spirit of adventure, but because a man had come to her with an inquiry of public concern, which she was duty-bound to look in to.

_Carpe diem_ was for children, dreamers, and disillusioned time travelers.

Life was for everyone else.

Chesterton had offhandedly muttered an address during their conversation, which Sarah had managed to scribble in her notebook. He hadn't actually said to what location the address was pertaining, but it was as logical a lead as any to follow. After all, when traipsing in the dark like she was now, all ties to this mysterious Thaddeus Lennox and his institution would be useful ones.

Sarah had her notebook out, and was combing through her neat scribbles as she walked down the street, searching for the place Chesterton had described. She held herself with confidence, smothering all signs of nerves and of any trait that would make her conspicuous in a crowd. She had donned a nondescript pantsuit and pee-coat, tied her wavy brown hair back into a tidy bun and carried with her a small, conservative handbag. All outward appearances considered, Sarah could have been any one of the thousands of London commuters traversing the city. She blended in.

About an hour and a half after leaving her flat in South Croyden, taking the tube to the Gloucester Road station, and wandering around aimlessly until her feet were on fire, Sarah finally found the place she was searching for.

And her expectations of a institution run by a megalomanic mastermind were certainly _not_ disappointed.

After traveling with the Doctor, Sarah learned to seperate evil lairs into two categories: Chameleon and Showy. The first, Chameleon, fell under the description of completely lackluster buildings like offices or sheds housing some kind of malicious operation deep inside, away from the public eye. The second, Showy, fell under the description of extremely ornate, ostentatious edifices screaming wealth and power, like Harrison Chase's mansion or Doctor Solon's old castle.

Lennox's institution, in no uncertain terms, fell under the latter category.

Just the front of the massive building, flanked by greek columns as thick as tree trunks, took up at least two city blocks. Sarah couldn't even begin to guess how _thick_ it was. The front door alone was big enough for a double-decker bus to cruise through, easy. The grounds were surrounded by expanses of lush green lawns, still fresh and growing even in the cold autumn weather, which Sarah thought was a bit odd. Before too long, she noticed many other incongruous details as well: the wrought-iron fence guarding the perimeter didn't appear to be locked, there was not a single window to be seen on the entire structure, and despite the enormity of the facility, passerby on the street didn't spare it a first glance, never mind a second.

"I've been living in London nearly my entire adult life, and I never knew this place existed," Sarah mused to herself, and tapped her ballpoint pen against her teeth as she pondered, "How do you hide something like _that _in a metropolis of millions of people?"

"I've wondered the same thing, actually."

Sarah yelped, unaware that she had company. A man: tall, wiry, his age hard to place, had come to stand beside her, and was regarding the Lennox Institute with a familiar mien of caution and suspicion. He was dressed like a scrubby private school teacher, but held himself with an air of self-regard and authority, as if he were used to being the commander of attention.

Sarah was immediately weary of him. Two strange men in less than three hours was about her limit.

"What do you mean, 'you've noticed the same thing'?"

The man tore his gaze away from the building and looked at her. He had uncommonly bright, adamantine grey eyes, which Sarah met with reluctance.

"This structure is a proverbial bull in a china shop." He said, "I just don't think it belongs here, that's all."

"You mean, you _can_ see it?"

He nodded gravely. "Yes, but you and I seem to be a distinct minority of the general population. Look around."

Sarah swiveled her head about the street, and the man continued,

"Look at the masses; they don't even blink. People walk right on by, not giving a second thought to the existence of a building the size of Buckingham Palace sitting smack-dab in the middle of the city. Don't you think it's a bit . . . odd?"

Sarah was still suspicious, so she asked, "Why your interest in the Institution? When you obviously have your own life to worry about, why take the time and effort to fret over _one_ out-of-place building?"

The man shrugged. "Because something about it just doesn't ring true. And I like to think that truth is singular, therefore its anachronisms have no place in our enlightened world. Why your own interest?"

"Who says I've got one?"

"Because you've been loitering out here for fifteen minutes in the freezing weather taking notes in that little book of yours. And because you're having this conversation with a complete stranger in the first place."

"My interest is strictly professional." She stated flatly, trying to waylay her guest's curiosity.

"Are you with the police?"

"Why? Do you think this place is operating on an illegal basis at all?" Sarah was carefully trying to glean as much information as possible without ramming questions down the man's throat, playing him at his own game, as it were.

"I do not know . . . yet. But I'm sure as hell going to find out."

"Come again?"

He broke into a sly grin. His teeth, Sarah noted uneasily, were as straight and white as picket-fences, like a photograph out of a dentistry magazine, "I'm going to break in."

Sarah snorted. The man must have been fooling around with her now, taking her for an idiot.

"I am being quite truthful." He insisted, "And as I said before, truth is singular. When one finds oneself to be the upholder of self-evident truths, it must be himself who places the maintenance of said truths into his own capable hands. Besides, my knowledge of the Lennox Institution is deeper than most would at first glance suspect. Who better to break in to a top-secret establishment than a former employee?"

"You worked here?"

"On a need to know basis, yes." He seemed genuinely disgusted at the reality of it, though.

He clarified, "If, that is, keeping me locked in a basement for three years, paying me to _think_ for them, can be considered work. I wasn't told what I'd be working on, _per se_; I just wrote theorems and did quantum-mechanical calculus for them from 9 to 5. The only thing to show for it was a pay-check at the end of every month and a reminder to keep my mouth shut and don't ask questions. A long story short, I managed to get out and cut my ties. I walked away, and now it's time for them to answer some of those questions." He looked down at her again. Those grey eyes of his seemed to flash with an inner light of their own. "And I want your help."

Every alarm bell went off in Sarah's head. "Me?! You must be bloody joking, mate."

He was inscrutably calm when he said, "I'm being deadly serious . . . Miss Smith."

Her stomach did triple summersaults. She hadn't told the man her name! Perhaps he'd recognized her face from one of the few magazines she'd contributed to over the years, but the coincidence was so slim, Sarah wasn't going to hang around to find out.

"Don't run. Please." He reached into his coat and dug around for something. Before Sarah could turn, he held his hand out, and in it, a raggedy old thing he'd scrounged from his pocket.

Sarah's heart leapt into her throat.

In his hand was a crinkly white bag.

And in the bag were dozens of jellybabies.

"A token of my trust." He said gently. "And a hope that I will receive yours in return. We are bound together by ties that exceed our shared interest in the Lennox Institution, Miss Smith. Ties to the greater forces of this universe, and to the men who work to preserve the balance of those forces, both good and bad."

He began to walk away, but left the white bag and its contents in a still-stunned Sarah Jane's open hand. Before he had disappeared completely behind the next street corner, away from the sprawling mass of the Lennox Institute, he called,

"Midnight tonight, Miss Smith."

* * *

"And I hope the remnants of your former self haven't given up the ghost just yet."


	12. Chapter 11: Requiem

2nd Year of the New Age, 2067

The Cinder of Sol 3

* * *

The Doctor gave the holographic figure of Thaddeus Lennox a steely, wide-eyed stare. "Am I supposed to be be impressed?"

"_You should be_."

"I've never heard of you before. And for me, that's quite an achievement; I've met just about everyone at one point or another."

"_I am your doom, Doctor_."

"Because you can do party tricks with the TARDIS? Hardly! My highly impressive card shuffling didn't get me into a SRS meeting, did it now?"

Lennox sniffed, disgruntled at the naivety of the man. "_Your TARDIS is a superfluous detail. For all of your wisdom and, quote-end-quote, 'unsurpassed intellect', you are still quite unaware of the patterns of time around the Cinder of Sol 3. Or, to be circumstantially correct, the shredded remnants of those patterns_."

The Time Lord's brow arched. Despite his inherent weariness, and his considerable anger at the sheer scale of what he suspected Lennox of being responsible for, he was curious.

What _was_ this strange creature standing before him? A God, as he claimed to be? Or something much more vague, and far more dangerous.

"Time is a tricky business, Mr. Lennox . . ."

"_**Doctor**__ Lennox_"

"_Doctor _Lennox . . ." The Doctor said carefully, "Time is made malleable by forces over which even _I _have no control over, let alone the likes of you!"

"_'_The likes of me_' has managed to strip your TARDIS apart and turn the Earth into an ashen orb floating mournfully through space, representing nought more than a memory and the sum of lost dreams. ME, Doctor. Not you. Not the Time Lords. Not the Daleks or the Cybermen or the Master. ME_."

"But WHY?" The Doctor cried, "What's the POINT? There are more bodies on that '_ashen orb_', that blistered husk of the Earth, than there are stitches in my scarf! What's the point of so much mindless destruction?"

Lennox, incredibly, gave an inconsequential shrug of his bony shoulders. "_Those of a lesser intellectual capacity would call me a psychopath, Doctor._"

"Kudos for honesty, then."

"_But I believe psychosis to be merely a term describing a mindset that most people cannot understand. __I seek no physical gain. For what, really, is the point of doing anything? Money? Power? Vengeance? No . . . nothing so tangible. Nothing so damn _boring_. I killed all of those people because I had the ability to! I, a mere human being, ripped apart the Web of Time simply for the pleasure of proving that I could, of gaining that small measure of personal satisfaction. And to prove that, amidst the terror, amidst the helplessness, amidst the _screams_, the Doctor could do _**nothing**."

"I would have stopped you!"

"_But you didn't even know it was happening! You weren't aware of a single blind thing until your TARDIS landed on the skeletal remains of the Earth._"

"_Such is the beauty of the controlled carving of the time lines. A temporally-sensitive being, such as yourself, doesn't know what's happening until you've been ensnared in the heart of the storm. The trap, in actuality, does not exist until you've trodden right in the middle of it. The cat is both alive and dead, but I have smashed the bottle of cyanide._ _And so 'Dark night strangles the traveling lamp / Is't night's predominance, or the day's shame / That darkness does the face of earth entomb'_."

"I would have stopped you . . ." He said again, weakly.

"_No. Not this time. This time, you've __**lost**_."

The Doctor felt hollow, and completely empty. He was numb from the sheer shock of what he was hearing. _Everyone _had a reason for everything. He could _understand_ the mental processes of power-hungry, megalomaniacal villains seeking to take over the universe. They had ambitions and goals seeking to be fulfilled; their minds could be combed apart, the psychology decoded and, with luck, second chances offered. Nothing in life was to be feared, it was only to be understood.

What was Lennox? Was he more than human, or something far below the darkest depths of humanity? And how could the Doctor hope to fight something he did not and _could not_ understand?

"Time is the ultimate conquerer, Thaddeus Lennox." The Doctor said softly, "It dictates the death and destruction, as well as the birth and rebirth, of countless worlds, even entire realities. Every decision, every cognizant thought, every firing of a neuron in the brain of every reasoning intellect, moulds the Web of Time in such a way as to spawn our own personal alternate realities, as it were. We create our own futures, Doctor Lennox. We make beauty out of the random miscellaneous. And neither you nor I have the power to change that. And to think you destroyed entire histories, millions of people, and countless unknown futures, not to mention the life of my friend, just to prove Time wrong remains the most heinous, abhorrent, unspeakable abomination in the past, present, or future of this reality or of any other!"

Lennox seemed surprised. "_You don't care about the people you surround yourself with, Doctor. Not once they leave._ _Miss Smith was no different from the countless others. Why care now when her fate is far beyond your ability to rectify?_"

Leela, obligingly silent, gave a surprised start at Lennox's words. Her crystalline eyes, once russet brown, now blue after the ordeal on Fang Rock, were hesitant, jittery, and confused behind her closed eyelids, as if she did not believe Lennox's words but could not destroy the seed of doubt that had been sown in her mind.

Her expression of accusation, of disbelief in _him_, hurt more than Lennox's gloating ever could.

"I always care." The Doctor said quietly. "And never forget."

"_But you abandon_." Lennox argued, "_Isn't that what you did to Miss Smith? For a time, she held out hope that you were going to rescue her. I even let her keep that blasted TARDIS key, it was so amusing. She never stopped believing you would come. We wanted her memories, but she chose oblivion rather than betraying you_."

"Me?!"

Lennox smirked. "_And on your own head be the consequences. She was a remarkable woman, much stronger than I or any one of my associates could have anticipated_."

The Doctor glanced around, to ensure nobody else had infiltrated the TARDIS and joined present company. "And where are your associates now?"

"_Gone with the wind, I'm afraid. An unfortunate side effect of Temporal Recursion Manipulation. Affect the big events, and the small people of history get washed away . . . nothing is left but a husk, a life that might have been_."

"The bodies . . ." The Doctor paled.

"_Astute of you_." Lennox conceded, "_The 2__nd__ Law of Thermodynamics at play; entropy in the wake of temporal recursion taking physical form_."

"But why _Sarah_?! Of all people, why her?"

"_She was the first. And she knew you. But once it was affirmed that she could not give us what we wanted . . ._"

"And what did you want?"

"_Information about you, of course. Specifically, the secrets of the propulsion units of your time capsule, the TARDIS_."

The Doctor gaped. "But Sarah wouldn't have known anything! She wouldn't have understand the physics, the technology! How could you torture an innocent woman over such a monumental waste of time?!"

"_You underestimate her_." Lennox said, not a little critically, "_Granted, she could not give us the information we wanted at face value, so more subtle methods of infiltration was utilized. Her memories, her unconscious memories in particular, accessed through subversive hypnotism, proved to be most useful._"

"_Unfortunately, the experience caused irreparable damage to her limbic system, thalamus, hypothalamus and corpus callosum. She turned schizophrenic, eventually completely insane. We have no need of invalids, so the Temporal Recursion Manipulator was tested on her own timeline, specifically, the car accident that killed her parents when she was a child_."

"What did you do?" The Doctor managed to breathe.

"_We put her in the car._" Lennox finished bluntly."_She perished, and her past, present, and future erased._"

"That's obscene! Not to mention incalculably destructive to the Web of Time!"

"_I am the Spider of that Web._"

"I will stop you. Somehow, I'll set it right."

"_What is there to set right, Time Lord? You do not have usage of your TARDIS, your beloved Planet Earth is no more, and before too much longer, I am going to throw the girl into the shredding temporal winds of the Vortex and kill _**you**_ myself._"

Lennox snapped his fingers. The clear _pop_ echoed around the grid-work TARDIS like the brief pipe of a whistle. With a grating of machinery and a groan of protest, or perhaps of despair, from deep within the time ship, the three-dimensional plotting where the front door had been split open, like a knife thrust into butter. The fissure tore, and stretched into a black gateway, revealing the pulsating, flaming energy tendrils of the Time Vortex, yawning and monstrous in the void. The Doctor felt his stomach lurch, as sheer, bloody panic threatened to take hold of his hearts.

Somewhere in the distance, across the spaces of ages, a cloister bell began to toll.

"_**Doctor**_!" Leela screamed as the TARDIS shielding crumpled, and temporal winds snatched at her body and wrenched her towards the gateway. She drifted towards that kaleidoscopic tunnel of light that would slice her like a scimitar would a loaf of bread.

"Hold on to something!" The Doctor bellowed, desperate to be heard above the howling of the Vortex.

But there was nothing to hold on to . . . the TARDIS was little more than an infinite series of gridlines. There was no console, no roundled wall, nothing to use as leverage. Leela was being dragged helplessly and irrefutably towards the void, towards her death.

"Stop!" The Time Lord begged Lennox, no longer caring for his pride, "Please, close the gateway!"

"_Too late, Doctor!_" Lennox said gleefully, "_Once again, you are helpless!_"

"Doctor, help me _please_!" Leela cried, her eyes still shut, terror burnished onto her features. She flailed her arms and legs in vain, hoping to gain purchase on something other than empty nothingness.

The Doctor darted his head around, searching desperately for something he very much doubted he'd be able to find. Somehow, Lennox was preventing him from being dragged into the Vortex along with Leela. Something about wanting to kill him himself . . .

He knew the interior of the TARDIS like the back of his hand. Against the forces swirling around the ship, the Doctor managed to find the right spot in the gridding, the place where a very special addition to the console had once been . . .

There! He found it! A mere ghost, an X-Y-Z gridding shadow of machinery, but it was definitely, absolutely _there_!

"Nobody dies today, Thaddeus Lennox!" The Doctor roared. "Not today, and not ever again!"

With a purposeful, powerful thrust of his hand, the Doctor flipped the lever of the Fast Return Switch.

The spring in the switch had been sticky and temperamental since the Doctor's first journey to Skaro, so very long ago. It had never been fully repaired, and now, in a hope against all hopes, in a chance against all chances, as a faulty circuit, it had remained unaffected by Lennox's manipulation.

"_What have you done you fool_!" Lennox shrieked, realizing too late what was happening.

It was like music to the Doctor's ears, the final bar of Mozart's "Requiem", when the sound of dematerialization flooded the TARDIS.

Before their eyes, the slice in the skin of the TARDIS restitched itself as the in-flight shielding fought to reengage. The Doctor could have laughed and cried at the same time; the blasted chameleon circuit, which had fought him for so long and refused to be repaired no matter the manner of gentle coaxing or abusive kicking, was stubbornly battling Lennox's hold, trying to put the TARDIS back together. Mirages of walls, the transparent ghost of a hatstand, melted into existence from the blackness. Out in the incomprehensible shoals of the Time Vortex, the form of a duke blue 1960s London Police Public Call Box flew inexorably towards its destination: Earth, 2067.

* * *

The air was still and dead, hanging over the ground like long-accumulated dust over the mantels of a forgotten tomb. The entire landscape was wreathed in silence, unbroken by the merest crack, moan, groan, or twitter. The world was frozen in space and time.

But eventually, impossibly, absurdly . . . a sound did come, the sound of asthmatic brakes and heavy machinery, as alien to the blank slate of the earth as any extraterrestrial. It broke through the paralysis of the world; nobody was there to stir in its wake and revel at its illogical state of being. Nobody was there to bare witness to the sudden, wavery materialization of what appeared to be a tall wooden box, throwing itself into existence like a gaudy sploge of blue paint hurled onto a stark white canvas. When the object landed, nobody was there to see the three figures fall from the darkness of the doorway, fighting one another in savage fury with wild swings and misplaced blows, unused to the anger each of them shared in their desperation.

* * *

The reckoning of Thaddeus Lennox had begun.


	13. Chapter 12: His Last Hour

Unknown Date

Unknown Location

* * *

_At first, Sarah felt woozy and nauseous, for reasons she knew not. Her vision was blurry and everything swirled around in a dizzying, kaleidoscopic array of color, as if she had the mother of all hangovers. Luckily for her, no Alka-Seltzer was needed, and the sensation passed quickly. Before long, nothing was left save for a dull throbbing in the back of her head, and even that faded after a few seconds. In no time at all, she felt absolutely fine._

_Once her vision refocused, Sarah took stock of her surroundings. She had to squint, but she could immediately tell that there was something surreal, otherworldly, about the place. The sunlight peeked behind spotty cirrus clouds and gleamed between the branches of the trees, speckling the ground with dappled shadows. The air smelled of sharp spearmint and snow, fresh and clear as it carried down from the frosted peaks dominating the distance. The entire forest, with the huron blushes and the palatinate blue lake beyond, was bathed in the golden light of the fading day, shining and brilliant as the sun made its way behind the mountains. In the evening twilight, Sarah could hear the rich, fruity burblings of blackbirds and curlews. They sang the day's final crescendo; sad, beautiful, and hopeful for the days to come._

_Sarah took her first steps through the huron blushes, which brushed her legs with feather-light caresses. She found herself drawn towards the dazzling blueness of the lake. It stretch straight to the base of the mountains, huge and snowcapped, purple in the fading light. The surface of the water was unbroken by the merest ripple or crest; it reflected the golden sky and the sun-touched cirrus clouds like a mirror._

_As she drew closer, Sarah saw that on the bank of the lake, amongst a meadow of pond grasses, stood a stone bench, a model straight off the footpaths of Hyde Park._

_And sitting on the bench, back turned, gazing across the lake, was a tall, curly-haired figure._

_He turned to look over his shoulder, and gave her a delighted smile that very nearly bisected his face._

_"Hello Sarah." The Doctor beamed._

_Sarah wasn't as surprised as she would have expected. Despite the unusual circumstances, which bordered on the completely insane, she was amazingly calm. The entire environment: the air, the birdsong, the breathtaking vista on the lake, seemed almost too pristine to warrant concern._

_"I'm dreaming, aren't I?"_

_The Doctor cocked his head to the side. "Is it such a bad dream?"_

_Of course it wasn't, but Sarah didn't say so. She continued to stare over the lake, too deep in thought to elicit a response. It was if her sense of time and function had been slowed, as if she had been coerced into taking things in her stride; she could not summon the energy needed to do the arduous task of finding out what was going on and why she was here._

_"Sit with me, Miss Smith." The Doctor said in a gentlemanly fashion, patting the spot next to him while grinning an impish grin that was impossible to resist._

_She supposed there was no reason not to. If she was dreaming, then it was a pleasant enough dream. And if, alternatively, she had been plucked out of her boring day-to-day life and back into the whirlwind of the Doctor's own, after the ten-odd years they'd been apart, then she may as well accept the happiness kindled from seeing her best friend again. Especially after parting so regrettably._

_Sarah Jane Smith folded her skirt underneath her and took her seat at the Doctor's side, back where she belonged. _

_The granite bench was warm from the light of the daytime sun, and the view across the lake to the opposite shore, far away and nestled at the base of the massive mountains, was positively exquisite. The sand of the lakebed was as yellow as the Nubian dunes, turning the unbroken, crystalline surface of the water a magnificent shade of the richest blue. The golden sun was beginning to dip behind the pinnacle of the highest mountain, throwing long shadows like parlor rugs across the lake and setting the snowcapped peaks ablaze with fiery light. Carpeting the slopes of the foothills were hundreds of trees, coniferous and deciduous alike, glittering in the sunset. Their leaves were emeralds and peridots, their branches delicate arms of the deepest russet, and their mahogany trunks smooth and untouched by human hand, as they must have been on Earth long before the coming of man. The leaves acted as wind chimes as the evening breeze lighted touches on their branches. Accented by the warblings of the birds, the forest was deep in ambient song. _

_The pristine beauty was almost enough to bring tears to Sarah Jane's eyes. The place reminded her of the tourist photos and brochures she'd seen of places like Patagonia and New Zealand, though she knew no location on Earth could even begin to compare to the unspoiled splendor of the Eden around her._

_"What is this place?" Sarah asked on a whisper, allowing the birds to continue their songs unhindered._

_The Doctor, too, did not wish to disturb the peace, so his voice was low and rumbling when he finally answered her. As he did, he tilted his head skyward, and the gloaming light on his blue eyes turned them to a sparking, golden green. _

_"I don't quite know. But it is rather nice, all the same."_

_"Yes. It rather is, isn't it?" Sarah sighed contently, closing her eyes and allowing the clean scent of the forest to waft her nostrils. "Why couldn't you ever bring me somewhere like this when we traveled together?"_

_He looked at her with mock surprise. "Where would be the fun in that, hmm?"_

_"A little peace and quiet wouldn't have gone amiss, now and again."_

_"Touché."_

_Sarah grinned, "Nothing spoils a lovely evening like a triage of Daleks screaming 'exterminate' at the top of their lungs or an unwelcome visit from the Master, huh?"_

_The Doctor didn't have the biting response Sarah would have expected. If anything, he seemed hurt by the statement. He involuntarily flinched at the Master's name, as if the word possessed the pricking consistency of a sharp needle. The Doctor's distinguished features took on a darkened, more melancholy light, and he turned his gaze from Sarah and back to the far-distant mountains._

_"The Master has fretted his hour upon the stage once too often, I'm afraid." The Doctor said enigmatically, "No enemies this time. This time . . . it's just me."_

_"And me!" Sarah corrected him, feigning indignation._

_His young-old eyes glittered, perhaps from the sun shimmering off of the lake, perhaps from unshed tears, or perhaps from an emotion too deep and mysterious for words alone. He reached out his hand to touch Sarah's cheek, to assure himself of her physical presence. Before contact, he abruptly dropped his hand and murmured under his breath . . ._

_"But are you really here?"_

_"What do you mean? Of course I'm here! I'm taking to you now, aren't I?" She raised a nervous eyebrow. She was deadpan serious and grave when she asked, "Doctor, is something the matter? What's really going on here?"_

_"My time is almost at its long-overdue end, Sarah Jane." He gave her a wan smile._

_"What is that supposed to mean? Are you in trouble?"_

_"Trouble? No. I'm beyond that point now . . . past the point of no return, one might say."_

_"I really don't understand."_

_The Doctor didn't answer, but sighed deep in the back of his throat. The melancholy, far-away look returned to his eyes. For the first time, Sarah began to look at him. _**_Really_**_ look at him. The lines of his face had deepened, his cheekbones and the crow's feet in the corners of his eyes had become more pronounced. His hair, while still resembling, more than anything else, an epileptic hedgehog, had grown fuzzier and lighter in shade. Even his attire had changed; long gone was his familiar ensemble of tweed jacket, burnt-orange cravat, checked vest, and long, multicolored scarf. The outfit he wore was rich with reds and deep burgundies. His scarf still remained, but with only duel color tones coordinating with the rest of his sombre attire._

_He was a much-changed man, as Sarah was beginning to realize. He had lost some of his boyish, carefree, bohemian spirit. He had grown up, as she feared everyone must do one day. _

_Even, God forbid, the Doctor._

_"I'm dying, Sarah." He said with quiet solemnity._

_"_**_What_**_?!"_

_"I told you . . . my time is ending. As in many things, it is an inevitable fact of life. The day would have come eventually, it's just a shame that that day had to be today."_

_"Don't say that." Sarah interrupted, "You're not dying. You can't die."_

_He seemed almost amused by the absolute resolution in her words. "Why ever not?"_

_"Because I won't let you, that's why!" Sarah stuck her chin out like a stubborn teenager, arms crossed, daring the Doctor to challenge her._

_"Oh, Sarah." He smiled. Not a toothy, maniacal smile, but one of his more reserved, nicer smiles that never failed to light a cozy fire in Sarah's heart. "How much I have missed you. But there's nothing even _**_you_**_ can do for me now."_

_Sarah, in complete dread, felt something like a leaden ball sink to the pit of her stomach. His words rang crystal clear in her ears, as sharp as the minty scent from the mountains._

_"You're serious, aren't you?" She asked quietly. _

_He didn't answer. A nod was enough._

_"Are you going to regenerate?"_

_"I don't know. Maybe. I hope."_

_"There must be something I can do!" Sarah said in exasperation, "I'm not just going to sit by and let it happen!"_

_He shook his head. "There is nothing to be done now, Sarah. Just await the coming darkness. And sometimes . . . it's better to not fight the inevitable when the inevitable need not necessarily be a bad thing. I have made my peace, and am ready for whatever is to come."_

_"Besides," He chuckled, "We aren't really here anyway, so I can't imagine there's anything we can do to rectify the situation even if we were inclined to try!"_

_"But I'm here now! I exist!" She insisted, "I don't know how, exactly, but I'm most definitely here!"_

_"You're not here, Sarah. Not even _**_I'm_**_ here."_

_"Come again?"_

_"I'm still lying underneath the Pharos Telescope. I can feel the grass brushing my face, the dirt between my fingers. I can hear Tegan and Nyssa and Adric crying out my name. I can feel the places where the vertebrae in my spine have been shattered from the fall, and I can feel the internal hemorrhaging that will eventually cause both of my hearts to fail. This locale: the lake, the mountains, the wind and the birds and the beauty and the peace, are nothing more than the sum of the parts of a very vivid dream. All of this is taking place a mere fraction of a second before regeneration, a desperate shot-in-the-dark of a dying man, the détente before the storm."_

_Sarah dared to ask, "Then what does that make me?"_

_He gave her a curious look. "Most likely, you're just another figment of the dream."_

_"Thank you very much."_

_"But perhaps . . . I'm lonely, and decided to make a phone call."_

_"A phone call?"_

_"Yes, a phone call. Isn't it odd, that as I lie here dying, devoid of all hope of recovery, preparing myself for oblivion, that the one person in the entire universe I wish to see again is suddenly here?"_

_Sarah's eyes widened. Her face flushed with pleasure. "Oh."_

_"You were very important to me, Sarah. You still are."_

_To keep a most embarrassing blush from creeping over her features, Sarah spoke quickly, her words spilling forth because she was apprehensive of someone stopping her mid-sentence. "Look, if what I fear is going to happen really is going to happen, and being as I never got the opportunity to say it before, when we traveled together, and if this is the last time I'm ever going to see you, I just wanted to say . . . thank you."_

_"Thank you Doctor. Thank you so very, very much. For everything."_

_And then, she did something she could have never imagined herself doing in her youth . . . she kissed him, very lightly, on the cheek. With it, she established an unspoken bond between herself and the Doctor, an unspoken bond only made between the greatest of friends._

_The Doctor felt his hearts dribble in his chest. For a brief while, his sorrow abated. Far away, and yet in the same spot, the blind, screaming agony coursing through the body of a broken man lying underneath a massive telescope project ceased. Somewhere, the same man gazed into the far away distance, and smiled a wide, content smile. With that smile, he said . . ._

* * *

"It's the end, but the moment's been prepared for."

* * *

_In the land of the dream, the Doctor took his arm and looped it around Sarah's shoulders, pulling her close. She leaned gratefully against him, taking comfort in the soft burgundy fabric of his coat, his warmth, and the soothing rhythm of his hearts beat._

_"I don't care how I'm here, Doctor. I don't care if I'm a phantom or a dream or a telepathic projection." She murmured thickly, trying to keep her tears from falling, "And I don't care if I exist or not. All that matters is that I'm here, with you, and I plan on sticking around."_

_"Right to the end?"_

_Sarah snuggled herself deeper into the folds of his embrace._

_"Always." She whispered._

_They sat together in companionable silence, bearing witness to the glorious descent of the sun behind the distant mountains._

_"When it sets," The Doctor said quietly, "This will all be over, and I will regenerate."_

_Sarah's tears began to fall without effect, silently and sorrowfully. She let the Doctor hold her, and take strength from her presence during his last moments._

_Here, at the end of all things._

* * *

"How touching." Doctor Lennox said dryly, crossing his thin arms in staunch disapproval as Sarah regained consciousness.

She took a few deep, gasping breaths, trying to clear her head of the visions. They had seemed so _real_; she could still feel the salt-encrusted tracks on her face where the tears had rolled across her cheeks. She could even fool herself into thinking she could still hear the curlews, still see the peridot trees, and still feel the setting sun on her face, sitting quietly in the company of her friend, not locked away in a white room with two sadistic, twisted morons leering over her and delving into her mind.

"What the hell was that?" Sarah demanded. "What the _bloody hell _was that?"

"Something less than reality, yet more than a dream."

She rolled her eyes. "That's not an answer! I don't have any memory of that happening; how were you able to recreate it in such detail?"

"The unconscious mind is a plump cornucopia of phantasmic possibility, Miss Smith. A few snatches of visual memory possess the potential to construct an entire world." Lennox placed his hands on the chair's armrests, close to where Sarah's wrists were bound, and spoke with earnest intention. "All dreams seem strangely realistic until one awakes and is able to pinpoint the exact details that seem incongruous in an otherwise logical setting. But if one were to remove the incongruous details, if one were to edit the neural pathways in such a way during REM sleep as to recreate a hypothetical situation _exactly_, then what is there to differentiate the dream from reality?"

"It's all very clever and everything," Sarah spat, "And you would make a fortune if you were to market to psychiatrists, but it's hardly effective as a torture device, is it?"

"Indulge me."

"I _helped_ the Doctor. I gave him hope."

"Hope is fleeting and insubstantial. And, in the end, he still died."

"He would have died anyway!" Sarah argued, "He'd said he'd had an accident of some sort, some kind of fall. There was nothing anyone could do."

"And does that grant you reprieve from the knowledge of his death? Does that make you immune to the sadness of his passing?"

"Of course it doesn't! He was my best friend; of course I'm still grieving!"

Lennox smiled in cold delight. "Then, Miss Smith, I would argue that the Dream Room device is, in fact, serving its function admirably."

She snorted. "But it's all insubstantial! You can't torture me through dreams!"

"No, I cannot. But I _can_ torture you through killing the Doctor. Again. And again. And again. And again. And better yet, I shall ensure from this point on that _you_ are the one who kills him."

Sarah's features blanched, but she held her resolve. "I would _never_. And there's nothing you can do to make me."

Lennox bent forward, leaning until his face was barely a breadth away from Sarah's own. He locked his cold, grey gaze with her's, and with it, he froze her heart in her throat. Not for the first time since she'd been captured, at the center of Lennox's fixation, Sarah felt frightened.

* * *

"Try me." He whispered chillingly.


	14. Chapter 13: 'Stars, Hide Your Fires'

September 30th, 1986

South Kensington, London, England, Planet Earth

* * *

Sarah didn't have the energy to take the long journey back out of the city and to her flat in Croyden. The traffic had gotten heavier, and the brisk autumnal wind had gathered an extra nipping bite or too. She made sure to make a prominent mental note of the locale of the Lennox Institute: the street name, the number of cherry red phone booths on the sidewalk, and the precise layout of the townhouses of the somewhat Kensington-esque section of the city. Of course, being as no one else could _see _the massive structure of the Lennox Institute, asking directions would be a complete waste of time. Sarah had to rely completely on her own knowledge of the city and its layout, which was formidable to say the least.

From memory, there was a very quaint coffee shop on Gloucester Road, a few minutes from the Natural History Museum. Perhaps she'd be able to sort out her thoughts and her next plan of action there.

Leaving the sprawling Institute grounds far behind her, Sarah located the main road again and walked briskly along Thurloe Place until it became Cromwell. She fell into the pushing throng of schoolchildren and tourists lining up for the Museum along Cromwell Road, and slowly but surely made her way further into South Kensington, taking a shortcut through Stanhope Gardens. The coffee shop was nestled between two converted townhouses that had been made into insurance and law offices, and right across from the Gloucester Tube Station that would take her back to Croyden.

Sarah scoped out an empty two-person table with a street view, and ordered a small black coffee from the counter. Settling herself down as she waited for her order, she took out her notebook, the scrap piece of paper with the Institute address in Chesterton's scrawling handwriting, and his sketch of the H fractal. She lay all three on the table in front of her, but couldn't find anything to do with them except stare and delve deep into her thoughts.

She considered the grey-eyed man at the Institute. Was he just an ordinary man with extraordinary insight? Another defector, like Chesterton, just trying to clear his conscience? Or just one side of a die cast by fate, tied to her through a shared knowledge of the Doctor, as he had implied.

With it, she considered his offer, his plan to get answers from this mysterious Doctor Lennox. Sarah knew that there is no honor in subterfuge. Only lies and deceit can come of it, in time, though it may be hidden under a veneer of righteousness and good intention. Inevitably, anything committed against better judgement and against the knowledge of truth tends to pervert that truth, turning something once nobel into something black and detestable. While the idea of Robin Hood is good and proper, the actual existence of such a man breaking the law to preserve the law is so utterly ridiculous that this man in question may as well damn the magistrate and tie the noose around his own neck. There is no room for heros, no room for self-righteous martyrs, in the real world.

So why, sitting in a South Kensington coffee shop, pondering over her strange meeting with the grey-eyed man stalking the front of the Lennox Institute, did Sarah Jane feel an overwhelming desire to commit the grievous acts he had suggested? He had hinted at burglary, break-in, trespassing, and God know's what else. They were actions condemnable under many circumstances under most laws, but somehow, they seemed oddly appealing and not a little bit invigorating. Even ten years ago, at the height of her investigative career, Sarah would have considered such Don Juan methods of infiltration both idiotic and impractical. Through experience, she had often found that the easiest way to elicit information was to _observe_ the person in question, sit down and gather data from details. What makes his eyes flutter? When does his breathing hitch? Why does his entire persona freeze at the idea that she could undercover his deepest and darkest secrets? Hidden information was most easily accessed through people, because of course, people are far more fallible than any vault or safe.

In a way, investigative journalism was a lot like watching a Shakespeare play. One couldn't simply pick up a book or a script and start reading the parts, gathering the information at face-value. The data is flat, revealing the _whens_ and the _hows_ without necessarily the _whys_. Which, in the end, is the most important part of all, necessary in preventing anything nefarious from happening again. No, in Shakespeare and in investigative journalism, _people_ are essential. When Macbeth, at the knowledge of his Lady's death, cried out to the world his pessimistic sorrow . . .

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing."

. . . it is the _emotion_ that reveals the true extent of his feelings and the true heart of the soliloquist: the flourish of the hand, the anguished expression on the face, and the tear slowly trickling down the cheek. Sarah would never have been able to engulf the enormity of King's Macbeth's words without seeing the man himself, seeing how he carried himself at the mention of his long and arduous soliloquy. Truth is not found in facts and figures and reasons. Truth is found within the hearts of the people who orchestrate those reasons, in their motives and their faiths. In the little, miscellaneous trivialities that define who they really are.

"So why, pray tell," She murmured to herself, "Am I seriously considering that man's offer of breaking into the Lennox Institute in the dead of night without so much as a torch or a solid reason that would survive a court room?"

The question, she found, wasn't rhetorical, and Sarah didn't like what she suspected the answer was: sheer, blind, stupid curiosity, that nagging 'need to know' that lies at the heart of all investigative journalists.

And because the man in question, this mysterious, apparently dangerous Doctor Thaddeus Lennox, had made a move against the Doctor. Against the natural order the universe itself, if Chesterton's claim had had a grain of truth in it. Somehow, someway, through pure ignorance, stubborn arrogance, a little bit of both, or some far deeper reason altogether to which words could not be assigned, Sarah Jane Smith suddenly felt duty-bound to find this man and bring him his due justice. She was not about to let him destroy the remaining vestiges of a life she'd left long behind and whose fragments, though sharp and painful, remained to be the only things connecting her to the Doctor.

Investigative journalism needed people, and she wanted Lennox.

"'Stars, hide your fires / Let not light see my black and deep desires,'" Sarah found herself saying aloud, "The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be / Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.' And I so know I'm going to regret this later . . ."

Sarah made a decision; she knew what she would have to do. Tonight. At midnight.

"Table number 12?" A man carrying a single cup of the darkest coffee came over and looked at her expectantly.

"Yup, that's me." Sarah broke out of her daydream and gave the waiter a pleasant smile, praying that he hadn't heard her reciting Shakespeare.

"Small coffee, no cream or sugar."

"Thanks very much." Sarah took the cup gratefully and brought it to her lips.

The waiter didn't leave right away, but asked her midway through her first sip, "Was that Macbeth?"

Sarah very nearly spat her scalding coffee all over the head of the man at the table in front of her.

"Um . . . yeah." She spluttered self-consciously; she could already feel her cheeks growing hot. That young man probably thought she was some kind of out-of-work nutcase or a bygone relic of the Beats age; who else recites Shakespeare in a coffee shop?

"It was nice. You spoke with passion, like you really cared." He said simply, but honestly, tucking his tray under his arm and walking back towards the kitchen before she could utter a 'You're welcome'.

Sarah looked up as he left. He was an interesting fellow, more of an adolescent than an adult, very wiry with freckled, pale features and carrot-red hair. Not really the sort of face to blend into a crowd, but when she got up to thank him and pay him, about 15 minutes later, he was nowhere to be seen. When she asked, even the kitchen staff hadn't a clue where he'd disappeared off to.

Granted, Sarah Jane had far more important things to worry about than a nice coffee shop attendant, though it had been very sweet of him to pay her an unwarranted compliment over something as silly as Shakespeare. Perhaps she'd send him a card when all of the Lennox business had blown over.

He had a strange name. Sarah intended to remember it.

* * *

There couldn't be too many Vislor Turloughs in the phone book.


	15. Chapter 14: Terra Firma

2nd Year of the New Age, 2067

The Cinder of Sol 3

* * *

Leela was thrown almost immediatly from the fray, tossed aside like a ragdoll from a swinging blow that could have come from either Thaddeus Lennox or the Doctor. She lay, dazed and disorientated, in the fog as the two men continued to battle.

The Time Lord tried to pull himself away from Lennox's suffocating embrace, but the man's form was solid, all bones and sinewy tissue under pallid skin drawn over a living carcass, like taffy pulled too thin. As the Doctor grappled with with his adversary, he felt years worth of Lennox's unnatural strength pent-up behind every blow, every punch, that befell his face and chest. Lennox was old, or ageless . . . depending on one's perspective on time, but he possessed the strength of a Time Lord hundreds of years younger, fitter, and fresher than the Doctor himself. Lennox had developed to thrive on entropy, on temporal disarray, and it was from that abstract source that he drew his energy. The Doctor was soon overpowered, and thrown to the corpse-riddled ground beneath the inky soup of the fog, Lennox's hands around his neck.

The fall knocked the wind out of his lungs, and before he knew it, he found himself flat on his back, with Lennox's knee jabbing into his sternum. The man's long and powerful fingers grasped the Doctor's throat, his fingernails digging fresh red pockmarks into his jugular. Even with his respiratory bypass system, the Doctor's lungs soon began to scream from oxygen depravation; all of Lennox's body weight was crushing his diaphragm, disabling his supplementary bronchioles and alveoli from filtering the excess carbon dioxide from his system.

The Doctor's vision soon started to swim, until the faint blue outline of the TARDIS, the paleness of the sky, and the silvery orb of Lennox's face swirled together with taches of violent reds and pulsating blacks, dominating his senses like some macabre post-impressionistic painting. Even that began to fade to darkness as the Doctor's strength ebbed; he could not combat the unnatural stamina of Lennox's temporal independence.

"Do this universe a favor." Lennox growled, "Die already."

The Doctor choked out, "Not . . . on . . . your . . . say-so."

"You have nothing! You are superfluous in this world, and your time is over!"

"_NEVER! It is _**your**_ time that is over, foul creature_!"

Leela rose from the fog, unsheathed her knife, and attacked.

She was a lightning streak of brown, moving far faster than the Doctor's oxygen-starved brain could comprehend, bulleting from the swaths of fog and catapulting herself right onto Lennox's back. Her weight twisted him off the Doctor, who lay weak and gasping upon the ground.

Leela howled a blood-curdling battle cry of animal ferocity. A flash of metallic silver, glinting in the pale light, rose in Leela's hand and sank itself between Lennox's shoulder blades. She pressed it home, wrangling it and burying it up to its leather-bound hilt. Roaring in pain, Lennox wheeled away from the prostrate Doctor and grabbed a handful of Leela's hair, trying to wrench her off. Accented by shrieks of agony on both their behalves, they danced through the fog like two maniacal ballroom partners. Lennox was unable to detach Leela, whose hand would not leave the handle of her hunting knife buried in a knot of muscle just beside his spine. Lennox tried backing up, until his heels were brushing the edge of the TARDIS's front step. He then gave Leela's hair an extra powerful tug to the right, and sank his knobby elbow into her temple, trapping her head between bone and the wooden frame of the TARDIS door with a sickening _crunch_.

Leela's eyes fluttered, and her hunter's grip went slack as she slid from Lennox's back and to the ground. Her prone, bloodied form lay lost in the fog.

Lennox barred his teeth in an animalistic snarl, reached behind him, and tore the knife from the folds of his flesh. When he brought the weapon to bear in front of his chest, his hand was red and slick with his own blood. The look in his eyes was beyond the point of calculated psychosis; it was pure savagery. Any remnant of humanity, any vestige of understandable morality, if it had ever existed at all, was long gone.

The Doctor got to his feet, swaying on wobbly, oxygen-deprived legs. His face was taught and anguished, not on his own behalf, but on that of his companion's. He wanted more than anything to see if Leela was alright . . .

"If she's seriously hurt, Lennox . . ." The Doctor muttered softly, but with fatal calmness.

"You'll _what_, Time Lord?" Lennox sneered, "Scold me? Ask me not to do it again? Say 'Pretty please, Tad old boy, don't kill the savage bitch who retains less of the veneer of humanity than a rapid lapdog!' We both know, Doctor. You. Will. Not. Kill. You would condemn an angel, if it meant giving the devil a second chance!"

"Everyone has their limits, Doctor Thaddeus Lennox." The Doctor said dangerously, "And mine is much, _much_ smaller than I would have people believe!"

"Then prove it!" He dared, "Kill me, Doctor! Defend yourself! Avenge the deaths of Sarah Jane Smith and every other goddamn person on this miserable planet, because I'm sure as hell going to kill you if you don't!"

"You're mad . . ."

"I am going to prolong your agony to the outer limits of mortal capacity until you are begging for me, _screaming_ for me to stop! _Because . . . I . . . hate . . . you_. I want to see you suffer as nobody has suffered before! I want to see you die like my family died, frightened and hopeless and alone, and in _agony_. Because that's what you deserve, _Doctor_. Because that's _far more than you deserve_!"

"I hold no quarrel with you, Lennox!" The Doctor roared, backing away slowly as his adversary advanced with Leela's bloody knife. He tried, desperately, to keep his footing on the uneven ground, but didn't fancy his chances should he have to make a run for it . . .

"Whatever I have done to hurt you," The Doctor continued, more gently, "For whatever way I have wronged you, I am truly, terribly . . . sorry. But your actions can never be condoned through mass murder, or through my own suffering. An eye for an eye, remember? Death is not the answer!"

Lennox looked insulted by the very idea. "I don't want vengeance, Doctor! I don't want your apologies! I just want you _gone_! I want the plague of your very being scoured from the face of existence, for _the sake of existence_! Who are you to decide who lives, and who dies? Who are you to decide what is right, and what is wrong? Who are you to reign over the fates of all people, directing their lives like those of a mere pawn in your cosmic game of chess!"

"If I kill you, I give the people of this universe free will again! The lost souls of this world, Sarah Jane Smith included, exist in the only form of freedom left for them in this reality, in the only form of salvation from the Doctor's manipulation in their lives: DEATH. I didn't kill those people, Doctor. _YOU DID_!"

Lennox had drawn closer, brandishing the dirty, jagged weapon in an ungainly but threatening fashion. The Doctor was completely defenseless; he could run, but that would mean leaving the TARDIS behind, doors unlocked, ready for whatever nefarious ill-intent Lennox had in store for it.

He would also be leaving Leela to die.

Lennox steadied himself when he was barely a foot away. Screaming in much the same manner Leela had done before, the man burst forward, arms extended, sharp blade driving towards the exposed space between the Doctor's hearts.

The Doctor dodged the swing, jumping backwards onto large pelvic bone of a particularly massive skeleton. Leela's knife swooshed past the trailing ends of his scarf, just nicking a bit of the fabric. He had a split second to collect himself and regain his balance before Lennox was taking wild swings again, slicing the air mere centimeters in front of the Doctor's body. The Time Lord's clothes were soon riddled with small slashes and holes. Fortunately for him, Lennox possessed neither the skill nor the aim of Leela's own arm. For a time, he succeeded only in backing the Doctor away, keeping him on his toes, and making a right mess of his clothes.

But Lennox was a quick learner. Adrenaline, along with the incomprehensible processing power of his massive intellect, calculated the Doctor's next move by recognizing and reacting to the twitching of his key muscle fibers. Before too long, Lennox's grey eyes fixated on his prey, and his motions with the knife became familiar and more comfortable. In mere seconds, he was attacking the Doctor with coordinated strokes that were beginning to do a little more damage than nicking his clothing.

The two drew further and further away from the TARDIS, until it was nothing but a blue smear on the horizon. The Doctor was beginning to tire, but Lennox's untempered strength and developing skill remained unhindered.

It was inevitable when the Doctor cried out in alarm, and felt himself lose his footing on a brittle sliver of skeleton. As his ankle sank into the fog, and he reflexively raised an arm to steady himself, Lennox thrust the knife towards the Time Lord's exposed left side

Acting before thinking, the Doctor jammed his right hand into his coat pocket, drew something out of its unfathomable depths, and made the motion of blocking Lennox's strike. To their shared incredulity, the knife was parried with a _clang_.

It was the sonic screwdriver the Doctor held across his chest, catching the wickedly sharp edge of the knife. Unfortunately, Lennox got over his initial surprise quickly, and was soon exchanging blows as swiftly and as viciously as he had done before. The Doctor tried desperately counter the strikes, but with the blunt rod of the sonic screwdriver, he could only defend himself; he could not attack in turn. It was only a matter of time before his adversary found an opening.

Lennox, sensing the futility of attacking the Doctor's vitals point-blank, withdrew the weapon and lunged at his right knee, hoping to disable him. It was a difficult maneuver for the Doctor to block. He swung the sonic screwdriver downwards and deflected the blade away from his hamstring tendon. With his arm drawn back and his body slouched over towards his feet, the Doctor's balance wobbled awkwardly. Lennox acted on his advantage, flicked his wrist up at a ninety-degree angle, and propelled the knife straight into the soft flesh underneath the Doctor's armpit.

The Time Lord screamed.

Time seemed to crawl, as if the pitch of the entire world had been lowered on a slowed turntable. Lennox drove the knife deeper as he held the Doctor's left shoulder and pulled his body further into the blade. The sonic screwdriver fell, almost in slow motion, from the Doctor's hand and into the ground fog. His entire body slumped, numb with shock, but Lennox braced him upright and ensured the knife drove home to its target.

"Does it hurt, Doctor?" Lennox whispered into his victim's stricken face.

There were tears in his eyes when the Doctor murmured through gritted teeth, "Yes."

"Do you want to know how long I can prolong the pain?"

The Doctor didn't answer because Lennox gave the knife an aggressive twist, eliciting nothing more than a tortured whimper.

"_Indefinitely_. I have mastery over the 4th dimension. I can replay this moment again and again and again, to the last syllable of recorded time. And the best part is, you're a Time Lord, so you'll be aware of every passing second of it!"

The knife sank deeper, and the Doctor moaned. He knew the weapon would not kill him, Lennox would make sure of that. The pain would bring him to the brink of the waters of Lethe, to the very edge of being, and leave him gazing down into the chasm of black oblivion, frightened and vulnerable but unable to fall due to the lifeline of sheer willpower Lennox had strung around his throat.

The Doctor would hang suspended between life and death, drifting in the grey void in the space separating black and white, poised on a threshold of suffering, neither alive nor dead.

Forever.

The Doctor initially attributed it to shock when he felt Lennox seize up. The iron might, once unbreakable and untouchable by the sirens of time, was now little more than brittle ice. Lennox's muscles contracted and tightened like flesh touched by tetanus. The Doctor felt the grip on the knife slacken to insignificancy, and then to nothing at all.

He soon began to realize, through the haze of pain and terror, that he was not in shock.

Something had happened to Thaddeus Lennox.

The villain gave a spasmodic shudder, and pitched forward into the fog. The Doctor, despite his injuries, despite the scream of protest coming from his right side, fell forward and grasped the fallen Lennox's lapels in balled fists. The man's steely grey eyes were glassy and unfocused, his breathing was shallow, and his skin was sweaty from fever. The Doctor knew the symptoms. He saw the wooden darts, headed by silvery, attenuated hairs, impaled into the side of Lennox's arm, and he knew immediatly what had happened.

_Leela_.

"Too late . . . Doctor." Lennox smiled wickedly, gasping with the last vestige of his strength, before the Janus thorn poison shredded his nervous system, "My secrets die with me."

"Tell me how to undo what you've done!" The Doctor demanded, pulling Lennox's lapels until the man's upper body hung suspended above the ground, "How did you manipulate the timelines? What device did you use?"

"No . . ."

"You have the opportunity, now, to rewrite every unspeakable abomination you've been responsible for. You can rectify your mistakes. Find the minute silver of goodness you have within you, Thaddeus Lennox, and tell me how to set the Web of Time right again!"

"I have . . . no goodness in me . . . Doctor." He let out a tortured, crooked laugh, "Only dust."

"TELL ME!"

Lennox sat up, and spat in the Doctor's face.

"Look on . . . and despair. For I am . . . become Death . . . the Destroyer of Worlds."

He shuddered one last time, and then lay still. The grey eyes were as blank and listless as shale orbs.

Thaddeus Lennox was dead.

The Doctor swore in old high Gallifreyan, and flung Lennox's dead body to the ground in utter contempt. Whatever knowledge Lennox possessed, whatever manner of salvation he controlled, had gone with him to his grave. The Doctor had lost.

He got shakily to his feet, and started to take a few powerful steps forward, but the deep gash on the underside of his arm ached in protest and began to bleed more profusely. The Doctor was painfully reminded of his own impairment; his hand flew to his side and uselessly tried to stop the blood from trickling between his fingers.

Leela, standing from afar, still grasping a quiver of Janus thorns in clenched fists, suddenly dropped her stock of weaponry and dashed forward. She tore a strip of leather stitching from her dress. She took the rough fabric and pressed it to the Doctor's side, staunching the bleeding as best as she could.

"What have you done?" He asked angrily through gritted teeth. The coarse leather rubbed like a cheese grater on the mangled, tender tissue.

"I saved your life."

"You have destroyed the future, Leela!"

"I. Saved. Your. Life." She said again, firmly.

"Any chance I had of using Lennox's own methods to undo the damage he has done is lost! We know nothing about him; we have no idea how he was able to do what he did, and now we don't know how to initiate the reverse application . . ."

Leela kept her left hand firmly planted on the leather compress, while she brought her right hand up and slapped the Doctor, hard, across the face.

The blow sounded like a whiplash in the white, silent void. The Doctor was so stunned he could only stare at her slack-jawed, unable to find the right words to convey the very _delicate_ things he wanted to say.

"That is better." Leela said gruffly. "Your babble was causing the wound to bleed more."

The Doctor still didn't say anything. His eyes burned and his jaw twitched, but he did not resist as Leela unwound the scarf from his neck and wrapped its long folds around his midsection, tying her makeshift compress firmly against the knife wound.

"I do not understand Time like you do, Doctor." She continued gently, not looking up from her work as she talked, "I only understand Time's beginnings and Time's endings, birth and death. I failed to kill Thaddeus Lennox before, and I dishonored myself as a warrior. But I would have dishonored myself as a friend, if I allowed him to kill you. I will not apologize for what I have done."

The Doctor considered his companion, and took the time to notice that Leela's face was still bruised from her fight with Lennox. Her long hair was matted with dirt and rusty clumps of blood. A vicious laceration trailed from behind her left ear to just below her eye. If Lennox had trapped her skull just a little bit higher, Leela would have been blinded. A concussion still rang behind her eyes; her pupils were jittery and unfocused. It was a miracle she had regained consciousness at all.

"How badly are you hurt?"

"My head feels as though it has been used as a war drum."

"You're very lucky, considering."

"I do not believe in luck. I simply survived."

"As we all must do. Someway. Somehow."

The Doctor sighed from deep within his chest. He stopped Leela's hand midway through her care, and made her look at him. That stubborn, primitive, incalculably brave young woman, the warrior who hid such tenderness beneath the deep rivers of instinct and intuition, who put up with his degradation of her person, and had risked everything to save his life.

"Thank you, Leela" The Doctor whispered kindly, and for the first time in what felt like a minute eternity, he smiled.

"Help me into the TARDIS." He ordered, "I will heal faster in there, and we have work to do."

"What work, Doctor?"

"Recursion, Leela. Recursion. What must happen will result in what will happen, and what will happen will cause the 'must happen' to happen. I am going to create my own temporal paradox."

* * *

"It's time to visit an old friend."


	16. Chapter 15: The Lion's Den

Unknown Date

Unknown Location

* * *

Her vision returned in sporadic bursts, blinking on and off like a poorly-tuned, snowy-screened television. When her eyes refocused, there was only blinding whiteness screening any proper glimpse of her surroundings. She suspected she may have suffered a concussion, for even when her headache abated and Sarah Jane felt comfortable enough to scrutinize her environment, she could discern nothing palpable or even remotely familiar. No guards, no dripping, hollow dungeon, no sneering monstrosity from the backwaters of the galaxy . . . nothing. There was only a choice. Close her eyes and embrace the darkness behind her eyelids, or open them and welcome the white light assaulting her sore corneas.

Hesitantly, Sarah wiggled her toes. She lifted her legs, snapped her fingers and cracked her knuckles. She began to hum the chorus to Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way". She was sitting slouched on a common-or-garden metal stool. She must have been propped up there during unconsciousness, left slumped like a marionette with its strings cut. But now, she found she could easily stand up and walk around. Wherever the hell she was, she wasn't restrained.

But, as far as Sarah could tell, there was no way out of her subtle prison. She wasn't secured in her cage, but it was a cage, nevertheless. There was no door, no barred window, not even a teensy little ventilation shaft, which made the thought of oxygen supply quite more alarming than it had been a moment ago. Sarah soon discovered that the blinding white light pulsating across her vision wasn't the remnant of a concussion or the ringing aftermath of a physical assault: she didn't have a mark on her! It seemed to emanate from the walls themselves. The entire interior reflected a hidden, artificial light source and magnified it to the point of painful intensity. The illuminated walls warped in an elliptical fashion to form a space which, to the best of Sarah's somewhat spotty knowledge, resembled more than anything the interior of an opaque fishbowl. There was no discernible groove or sideboard differentiating floor from wall from ceiling, no smudge, speckle, or blemish to mar the immaculate chalky surface.

And, no matter where Sarah looked, no matter how hard she tried to focus on anything otherwise, she found her milky reflection staring back at her. She couldn't help but lock eyes with a pale, ashen-faced woman in a careworn pantsuit, gazing through the white starkness of the walls, looking tired and ashamedly scared.

She had been captured. Of course she had. She had been a fool to even contemplate the possibility of _not_ getting captured! Her memories were as sharp and intense as the light of her prison cell. She remembered running, the alarm klaxon playing hell with her inner ears as it echoed around cavernous halls. She remembered turning a corner, blundering into a wall of black-suited bodies, a momentary flash like a camera bulb, and then a quick descent into blissful serenity, like floating into the first dreams after falling asleep. She had not experienced the pain that came from a struggle, nor the exhaustion of running away. She had simply closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she was here . . . wherever "here" was. In the brightness. All alone.

"A ray gun, perhaps?" Sarah mused to herself. "No, probably too advanced for this century. Taser? If it was, it was quick and powerful enough to knock me out before I felt anything. Perhaps a tranquilizer dart, or a quick jab of Ketamine from behind, or the old cloth-and-Chloroform trick . . . though I don't remember actually _smelling_ anything at the time. . ."

"None of the above, as circumstance would have it, Miss Smith."

Sarah gave a start, letting out an inadvertent squeak. Once her poor heart stopped palpitating, she took a good look and found she had a visitor. He (judging by the physique and the pompous way he carried himself, it was definitely a "he") was silhouetted against the whitewash of the walls. The light hallowed his tall, angular build, giving him an almost angelic semblance. But as he stepped forward, taking large, loping strides like a child does on a zebra crossing, Sarah's stomach curled into a knot, and she realized her estranged guest was anything but angelic. Quite the opposite, in fact.

"You." It sounded unoriginal and terribly cliché, but Sarah simply could not think of a better thing to say.

"Me." The man agreed wholeheartedly. His grey eyes reflected the white light like polished marbles, so that Sarah could see herself reflected in them almost as well as in the walls themselves. It was very unsettling.

"You're the man I met. The man who was loitering outside of the Lennox Institute."

"How astute of you. Though I would hardly regard standing outside of my own front gate as "loitering"."

"You're Thaddeus Lennox. You're the little weasel that's put me through all this trouble." To the man's hidden surprise, Sarah sounded smug, as if she'd just won a bet with herself.

His voice was oily and sardonic. "You seem somewhat pleased with yourself, Miss Smith, which fails to make any sense to me."

"I knew it from the start." She said, "Waxy complexion, unnerving eyes, an aura that simply reeks of self-regard . . . I've been in this profession long enough to know a villain when I see one. The only things missing are the beard and the Nehru jacket."

"And yet here you are, Miss Smith." Lennox countered, "Hardly a self-satisfying feat to recognize an antagonist and still end up in his clutches."

Sarah crossed her arms in stubborn defiance. "What better way to confront you than to allow myself to get captured by you. Only way to get decent information, nowadays."

"Do not insult my intelligence by lying to me." He barked, "Your argument is a veil, and your bluffs a mere curtain. You had no intention of getting yourself caught, Miss Smith."

"Didn't I? I failed to mention that to myself at the time. So sorry."

"And your infernal flippancy will get you nowhere. I acknowledge that you may have recognized me for who I was at the time, and against better reason took it upon yourself to attempt an infiltration of my Institution, but your goal was not to end up here, with me, trapped. Your goal . . . was to rescue the Doctor."

Sarah didn't say anything, and she didn't need to. Lennox had hit the nail on its proverbial head.

"A bag of confectionary will do such wonders to an overactive imagination, wouldn't you agree?" It was now Lennox who seemed smug.

"Where is he?" Sarah Jane demanded, "What have you done with him?"

"I hate to put a spike through your heroics, Miss Smith, but I'm afraid the Doctor is not here. He never was."

"You're lying."

"Do I look like I'm lying?" He leaned forward, and his powerful eyes radiated an intense sense of absolute conviction. "Ask yourself: if I had the Doctor himself at my beck and call, why in the world would I want someone as mediocre as the likes of you?"

"You tell me."

"You are nobody, Sarah Jane Smith. And no matter how much you try to tell yourself otherwise, no matter how many times you try to convince yourself that the Doctor made you special . . . you are not. You are just one of the flock, one of the billions of people who go through each day certain of a better future, certain that the coming weeks and months will bring about a change and that your existence will attain some universal meaning or purpose, only to have the years frittered away until death is at the door. Leaving nothing but dust . . . and the shallow husk of a human being who has never really lived at all."

Sarah's hazel eyes narrowed in anger, "If I'm so unimportant, why am I here? Why take the trouble to catch me at your precious Institution, to plant the jelly babies, to get that lying scum Ian Chesterton to get me interested, which I assume was your doing, if I was of absolutely no importance?"

Lennox seemed genuinely amused by the mention of an "Ian Chesterton", but said nothing on the matter.

"You are here, Miss Smith, because I believe an accord can be struck between us. I can reward you handsomely, can open doors in your career, salvage a bit of your former reputation. I am not entirely without influence. In return, you will provide me with a reasonable amount of information. Information concerning the Doctor, and his traveling machine . . . the TARDIS."

Sarah spat, "I don't know anything that would be useful to you. Even if I did, I'd hardly tell you."

"I have it on good authority that you do know a little more than most, that you and the Doctor were . . . close. That his bond with you extended beyond that of mere traveler and companion. Beyond that of friendship."

She scowled, but something twanged painfully in her chest. "Who's authority?"

"A very agreeable gentlemen. He told me all about you and the Doctor. He even helped me design the security of the Institution, establishing a psychic barrier that would deter most curious passerby. He called himself Herr Meister."

Sarah pinched the bridge of her nose. "This man didn't happen to have that beard and Nehru jacket I mentioned earlier, did he?"

"Yes, in fact he did." It was clear Lennox was enjoying himself immensely, and that he knew exactly who he had been dealing with.

"The Master doesn't bestow favors on most humans, Doctor Lennox." Sarah said scathingly, "You must be particularly abominable."

"Thank you."

She rounded on him, scowl deepening. "If you need information about a TARDIS, why didn't you just extract it from the Master while you two were having tea and biscuits? Why me?"

Lennox took a seat on Sarah's old stool and faced her. His voice was low and serious, and had a glinting edge to it that made Sarah worried and entranced at the same time.

"I am going to tell you a story, Miss Smith. A story of a adolescent boy who was slotted to be one of the most brilliant minds of the recent age. He was the only son of two wealthy persons in the British hierarchy, and he detested them unconditionally. He looked down upon them, and the rest of humanity for that matter, because they could not begin to amount to the sheer scale of his intellect. They were a disgrace to even share a room with. He had received three Doctorate degrees from Oxford University, in Astrophysics, Theoretical Cosmology, and Aerospace Engineering, by the age of 16. He decided to make it his life's goal to conquer Time itself, to push the human race into a new age of scientific research and space exploration, not out of a philosophy of goodness, mind you. But because humans were _embarrassing_ creatures, so lost and misguided. And this boy was ashamed to be one of them, unless they were to improve, and improve quickly. Already, he has designed mechanisms. A Time Barrier, for example, which will lock a prisoner out of time and space and make them live forever."

"Sounds like charming young man." Sarah muttered dryly. She didn't like the sound of the Time Barrier _at all_.

"And then something happened which made the boy rethink a few of his ideals. 'And prophesying, with accents terrible, / Of dire combustion and combustion and confused events / New hatched to th' woeful time. The obscure bird / Clamored the livelong night. Some say the earth / was feverous and did shake.'"

"One night, forced to spend dinner in Downing Street with his parents, a terrible thing happened to the boy. He met a man. This Stranger was tall and regal, clad in smoking velvet and starchy white cloth, looking like a manifestation of an older Fitzwilliam Darcy. That night, in Downing Street, an attempted assassination of the Prime Minister took place, carried out by a race of creatures not of this Earth. In the melee, the Stranger saved the PM, but the boy's parents were killed. And not slowly, or without pain. They died in agony, burned alive, screaming as their blackened flesh was flayed from their limbs by creatures from the darkest depths of Hell."

Sarah hand went to her mouth in shock.

Lennox smiled, his teeth ferociously white in the prison light. "Do not distress yourself, Miss Smith. The boy was not upset over the death of his parents. In fact, he thought they deserved it. They were such despicable excuses for life."

"They were his parents!" She exclaimed, horrified.

He ignored her outburst, and continued, "The only thing that had shaken the boy was the presence of the Stranger, the old Darcy figure. He had been so adamant about saving the PM, that he had allowed the boy's parents to suffer. The Stranger claimed they were unimportant to the "Web of Time", and "sacrifices had to be made", and that he was "so very, very sorry". The Stranger was obviously upset, but not more so than the boy. Who did that man think he was, to claim supreme power over the decision of life and death? What God had bestowed that right upon his shoulders? Why him, and not someone else. Why not someone like . . . me?"

Sarah paled. "It was an accident. He would have tried to save your parents. The Doctor _always _tries, you don't understand . . ."

"It is YOU who doesn't understand, Miss Smith!" Lennox threw the stool across the room as an uncontrollable rage beset him. "I don't want revenge! I want what should be mine, the power that the Doctor holds over the course of our lives and of that of the Universe's! I want his precious Web of Time to shatter. I want recursion to reign. I want anarchy. I want deviance. I _want_ chaos!"

"And my new invention, the Temporal Recursion Manipulator, will give me that power. All I need is some information from you."

"Never!" Sarah yelled fervently, "You're a monster! It was you who should have been killed in Downing Street, not your parents! I will never help the hellish likes of you!"

"You still do not understand, Miss Smith. This is not a choice. You _will _tell me what I want to know. Malcolm?"

Another man emerged undramatically from the whiteness, as if he had hidden himself away there the whole time. His starched laboratory coat dragged on the floor, but in the bright light, he seemed almost to float across the room on a cloud of air. He was completely bald, as pale as a ghost, and showed not the slightest twitch of emotion. His eyes were deep and pitch black, like a rat's, without comfort and without pity. His hands and nails were perfectly groomed and manicured, but in them, he carried a set of complex restraints rusty with dried blood.

He was the single most terrifying individual Sarah Jane had ever clapped eyes on.

"Malcolm's expertise lie in particularly unique field. This room, his "Dream Room", contains a fascinating device with very special properties. Malcolm doesn't say much himself, but he is absolutely brilliant at getting other people to do just that: talk. With his skills, and my inventions, the possibilities for in-depth "discussions" are endless. So . . ." He eyed Sarah's stricken face, "Shall we talk now, or with Malcolm?"

Sarah's head was pounding. She felt faint and nauseated, and so very, very scared. She was in the grasps of horrible nightmare, and any minute now she was going to wake up. She was going to wake up and everything was going to be back to normal please God please Doctor please anybody put everything back to normal he's going to torture me and rape me and hurt me and kill me . . .

She found herself saying, her mouth dry and cracked, "I will not betray the Doctor. You can all go to hell."

Lennox's eyes flashed with an unfathomable, sadistic pleasure.

* * *

"That, Miss Smith, is what I hoped you would say."


	17. Chapter 16: Moirai

_The beautiful miscellaneous is not any one or any few items of tangible malleability. It is not money, power, or property. Nor is it a belief: it is not a religion or a way of life. The beautiful miscellaneous is, rather, a truth. It is a way of putting words to the small things that seem to echo with so much meaning in the universe and yet refuse to be defined by word of mouth. The beautiful miscellaneous is the elixir of both infinite dreaming and finite comprehensibility. It is the underlying eddy that shapes passion and love. The beautiful miscellaneous is the path of destiny that our lives follow; it defines the meaning of our pasts, the fulfillment of the potential of our presents, and shrouds in mystery our indeterminate futures. The beautiful miscellaneous is the mathematical elegance of space and time, as well as the abstract mystery of human emotion. It is neither, and it is both. It is what we wish to make true out of a sea of untruths. The beautiful miscellaneous is the secret chord by which God serenades the universe. And the song of the beautiful miscellaneous will continue to play, enthralling in its embrace the lives and destinies of the Time Lord known as the Doctor, and the Terran woman Sarah Jane Smith. One is alone, in the silence of madness, with no hope of release. Yet the other flies through the stars, far away, long ago, in the vast expanses of the universe. They are two very different beings connected by something beyond the simple boundaries of friendship, their destinies intertwined across an eternity of space and time._

_In this desperate, final hour, they must find each other again in the dark, and the beautiful miscellaneous must continue._

_Out, out, brief candle . . ._

* * *

Something the recesses of Sarah Jane's Smith's tortured psyche finally broke. The impossibility of what, or whom, she beheld was too much for her already damaged mentality.

There was soon tears, streaming down her hollow, skeletal face like the swollen tides of the Ganges. Her cries were silent, muffled by the padded tweed shoulder on which her head rested.

"But you're not real." She sobbed quietly, "You can't be real you can't you can't you can't . . . It's not fair!"

"Sarah." The Doctor took her face in his hands, gazing into the blurred, cloudy depths of her eyes. He ran his fingers tenderly through her short, stubbly hair. "Concentrate on me, eh? Listen to me. Listen to my voice. I'm real. I exist."

She continued to cry tears of utter, aching despair. "It's not fair. Why are you here? Why do you want to torture me further? What have I done to deserve this? Well, I won't go along with it. I'm not mad. You hear that, Lennox, I'm NOT."

Sarah tried to pull backward, out of his embrace. The Doctor kept as tight a grip on her arms as he dared, desperately hoping she would keep her voice down and out of notice of the anybody beyond the Time Barrier.

"Let me go! Let me go, Lennox!" Sarah wailed, thin arms and legs flailing like windswept branches, "I am a shadow and Fate is the one who casts it. Don't let the candle go out! Don't crack my shadow, _please_! Oh God, Lennox, don't hurt me again!"

"Sarah, I'm not Thaddeus Lennox." The Doctor pleaded with her, begging with hoarse whispers. His face was screwed into a wretched expression of grief. "I know you're scared. I know you're hurt. But I'm going to help you. I'm going to set you free!"

She suddenly froze, her muscles taught like coiled springs. She asked on bated breath, "Are you here to kill me, King Duncan? Are you here to kill me before I kill you?"

"King Duncan? Sarah Jane, I'm the Doctor! And you know I would never dream of laying a finger on you."

She barred her teeth and started to pull again, halfway dragging the Doctor across the cell with a strength not prominently displayed in her emaciated, broken form. Her throat was dry and ravaged when she rasped, "I _am_ Macbeth. They made me kill Duncan, again and again and again until I feared the moment I wouldn't be asked to kill him anymore and that would mean something was broken. Yes, something was shattered because the pattern would snap and I would go mad. I must be mad. The Voice must have won, because the pattern cannot be broken, understand? And now you're here to kill me, because the only way I cannot kill King Duncan is for King Duncan to rid himself of Macbeth. Death is my freedom. Death is the only thing that will save your life!"

She had regressed into tearful babble, muttering nonsensical phrases strung together like tangled cross-stitchings. She was exhausted, the effort of fighting had taken its final toll on her body and her heart. Sarah's tired muscles gave up the ghost and she collapsed into the Doctor's waiting arms. She hovered on the boundaries of dreams, no longer registering the Doctor's presence. No longer registering anything. Just sobbing, and lamenting in the broken ravings of the insane.

"Oh, Sarah . . ." The Doctor didn't feel the salty tracks of his own tears. He gazed at the husk he held in his arms, the ghost of a once proud, strong young woman . . . reduced to _this_.

"What have I done?" He murmured, "What _have _I done?"

* * *

23:30

September 30th, 1986

South Kensington, London, England, Planet Earth

* * *

"Oh dear. What _have _I done?"

Sarah Jane Smith tried to shut any doubtful thoughts out of her mind. She prided herself on being a woman not to be taken lightly. She prided herself on not being a right ruddy fool. As she so often delighted in telling her male colleagues and confidants, oftentimes right before pulling a big slice of incriminating evidence from under their noses, she was far more than just a pretty face.

That man from outside of the Lennox Institution, however, _was_ a fool. Sarah had been in this area of expertise long enough to recognize a trap when she saw one. Or met one, in her particular case. He was too perfect, too convenient. An anonymous ally possessed not only of knowledge regarding the Lennox Institution, but a willingness to involve her in an attempt to infiltrate said Institution? Please. The way in which the stranger had established his place in her investigations was so adage that it could have been scripted directly from a "Nancy Drew" novella.

And Sarah Jane Smith had never much cared for "Nancy Drew".

She preferred "Sherlock Holmes": Clever, calculating, and definitely not by-the-book.

The time was just before midnight. The nighttime cityscape was remarkably dark and foreboding. On the street housing the elusive Institution, not a cab, biker, walker, or private car broke the quiet reverie. Sarah herself took huddled in the dark doorway of a nice townhouse, a deep blue trench coat framing her face with its collar and trailing down to her feet like a shroud. In her hand, she carried an empty beer bottle and a hairpin.

The trick was simple. The time of the man's suggested rendevouz was midnight sharp. In order to avoid falling into the trap he had no doubt set for her, it would be necessary to arrive at any hour aside from the established time. But a time too early would have run the risk of alerting other authorities, the local bobby for example, and loosing the cover of night. Arriving too late would have given the good fellows of the Institution time to expect her, to trick her into an even greater snare. Sarah planned to ghost the rendevouz, at 30 minutes to midnight, catching her enemy by surprise before they had time to prepare for her arrival. Corner them before they cornered her, as it were.

The beer bottle was for appearances. Sarah planned to stumble her way across the vast expanses of the green, swaying and tipsy like a woman truly sozzled. If she was caught by some dutiful watchman, she could feign drunkenness, and that she had by no means meant to stumble into one of the largest facilities in London.

That she had by no means meant to rescue the Doctor.

She gave a grim smile at the irony of the situation, at the switched rolls, and pulled her collar tighter around her chilled cheeks. The Doctor would have been proud. For the first time in ten years, Sarah finally felt like she was doing the right thing.

* * *

Doing what he felt was the right thing, the Doctor removed his grey coat and bundled Sarah's prone form into its lengthy folds. She was so incredibly small, and brittle like dry leaves or cracked porcelain. He delicately placed her head against his shoulder, and took her body in his arms. She had ceased her babble, had sank gratefully into the water of Lethe. Once the Doctor had ensured her security, he bounded across the space of the room, knocking three times on the impenetrable Time Barrier that separated him and Sarah from the normal flow of existence in the outside world.

A door appeared. On the other side of the door, impassive and strung-tight like a tuned violin, was Leela. At her feet lay the guards, Janus thorns protruding from their fleshy necks.

She took a suspicious glance at the raggedy bundle in the Doctor's arms, as if to assure herself it was actually a woman he was carrying.

"I did as you asked with the sonic screwdriver." Leela affirmed quietly, "As soon as the guard left, I disabled him, and protected you when you went inside."

The Doctor nodded briskly. "Thank you. I suspect that particular guard was beating her before we arrived."

"We must take our revenge . . ."

He interrupted, "But our job isn't half-over yet. We still need to get back to the TARDIS. Someone is soon going to realize that the guards are not reporting in at regular intervals."

"But what about that room? Is it evil?" Leela asked urgently.

"It is an embarrassingly-primitive Time Barrier. The precursor to the finality of the Time Lock." The Doctor answered her with obvious disgust. "It cordons off a tiny sliver of the space-time continuum. Whatever or whomever is placed inside does not age, does not feel the effects of the passing universe beyond."

"That does not sound so terrible."

He stared at her. "In theory, someone could be placed inside for 20, no, 50 years, and come out again with barely 50 nanoseconds passing in the outside world. A person could be physically and psychologically tortured for an eternity, but kept alive by the rough isolation of the Time Barrier. Sarah could have been in there for thousands of years, and we would never know about it. There is no fate as horrible as that!"

"Then let us destroy it!" Leela hissed ferociously.

"I can't!" The Doctor growled as he set off down the corridor, Sarah in his arms, Leela at his heels, "If I were to destroy the Time Barrier, I would be destroying Sarah. She is still within it. Her past self has not left."

Leela nodded comprehendingly, though she did not understand.

"The space within the Time Barrier," He continued, "exists outside of regular time. An infinite number of moments are present within the room, an infinite number of lifetimes. To destroy it would be to erase an entire chunk out of the space-time continuum, including the lives of the people who have been placed within those infinite moments of existence. I would be condemning Sarah's entire timeline to oblivion. I would be no better than Thaddeus Lennox."

"The best we can do is run," He said powerfully, "and hope for the best."

* * *

23:40

September 30th, 1986

South Kensington, London, England, Planet Earth

* * *

The best Sarah could do at this point was run, and hope for the best. As before, like that previous afternoon, the massive front gate was unlocked. She slipped through, careful to keep her face covered by the rim of her collar, and lurched across the dewey green lawn. She tried to make her shamble believable, but efficient, moving quickly while keeping to the shadows of the trees and tall hedges bordering a gravel driveway. All the while, Sarah kept her eyes wide open and her ears peeled, scanning for the sounds of pursuit and scrutinizing the grounds for the tell-tale red light of a hidden monitoring camera.

The shambling, drunken gait, sashaying through the grass and avoiding the noisy gravel of the drive, brought her to the enormous front door in a little under 5 minutes. Glancing furtively over each shoulder, Sarah placed her beer bottle on the marble step with as little noise as possible and whipped out her bent hairpin. The lock on the door was easily the size of her fist, but that, in theory, would make jiggling the mechanisms all the easier. Sarah slunk forward, her knees and back bent in a crouch, and wiggled the pin into the lock.

She swore loudly when her hairpiece bent and ricocheted off a cement block in the lock cylinder.

The massive bronze bolt was decorative! Perhaps she was more the fool than she gave herself credit. Raising her head slightly higher, Sarah could make out the box of a nondescript black card swipe attached to the far-left side of the doorframe. She felt a momentary wave of despair, realizing that her efforts may have been for nought.

And then she heard footsteps. Heavy, multiple, rapidly-approaching booted footsteps, coming from behind the closed double doors.

Sarah choked down a shrill croak of panic, launching herself over the handrail and into the thicket of decorative bushes lining the buildings and gravel pavement. She curled into herself, hoping she looked more like a shrubbery than she felt.

She could hear the heavy, labored opening of the huge door, and two male voices, gruff with their street Cockney accents, muttering to one another in hushed tones. Carefully pulling leaves and bush branches out of her ears, Sarah dared to lean forward and listen to their conversation . . .

" . . . and so Salisbury and Alan haven't reported in for 5 minutes ." One man barked, "Mr. Lennox has ordered a general sweep of the area. Keep an eye out for that Smith woman."

Sarah bite her tongue until it drew blood, hardly daring to breathe. They _were_ expecting her!

"Heard she wasn't supposed to be here for awhile." The other grumbled.

"She's early then, you clod. Her timing's bad. You know how women are."

Sarah had to stifle a few very choice words.

"Right-ho." The other man sounded bored as he sauntered off with his companion.

She waited until the both of them were well down the gravel pathway, hoping her footfalls would be muffled by their combat boots on the loose bits of stone. The two front doors were beginning to close again, slowly and inexorably, preparing to trap her outside.

Sarah leapt out of her hiding place in the bushes, dashed between the closing double doors, and, hoping that she hadn't been spotted by Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, bolted down the entry hall.

* * *

The Doctor and Leela bolted down the hall, hoping that they hadn't been spotted by any curious worker, guard, or scientist working late into the night. The two travelers, hardly believing their good fortune, rounded a gold-paneled corner, and saw the TARDIS tucked quietly behind a support pillar. Escape seemed so close . . .

"Come _on_, Doctor!" Leela cried, darting ahead of her companion towards the welcoming shape of the blue Police Box.

The Time Lord blanched, his hearts dropping down into his stomach. Unconsciously, he grasped Sarah form closer to him. "Leela NO!"

It was too late.

In the time since security at the Lennox Institution at been unable to communicate with the two guards placed in charge of the Time Barrier, the house's intruder prevention systems had been activated. And Leela had just gone blundering through the red beam of a laser sensor bisecting the wide floor.

In the quiet serenity of the dead of night, at midnight sharp, the alarm klaxon sounded like a possessed scream.

* * *

00:00

September 31st, 1986

South Kensington, London, England, Planet Earth

* * *

In the quiet serenity of the dead of night, the alarm klaxon sounded like a possessed scream.

Someone must have sounded the warning! Had the two sentry guards seen her?

"Oh God . . ." Sarah squeaked, trying to quell the wave of panic that threatened to blot out every other sane thought in her mind. She could already hear shouting and the pounding footfalls of a worrying number of security guards, converging on the main entry hall. "Oh dear oh dear oh dear . . ."

Run.

She hoisted her long blue coat off the ground and sprinted full-throttle away from the rounded staircase at the end of the hall, looking for a way out. She took an immediate 90 degree turn to her right, plunging into a darkened side corridor. Her footsteps, much to her dismay, echoed in the large, hallowed space like raindrops in a cavern.

"Just find a hiding place, Sarah." She soothed herself, "Just find a hiding place and wait until all the kerfuffle blows over. Keep your head. Keep calm. What would the Doctor do?"

The Doctor would probably go rushing up to his pursuers, introduce himself wholeheartedly, offer them a jelly baby, and end up in a worse predicament than before, but Sarah tried not to think about that. Despite her haste, she spotted another far left corner, positively blanketed in shadows, housing its far share of decorative vases and other posh paraphernalia.

Decorative vases large enough to fit a petite journalist, hopefully.

Sarah fixed her eyes on her new target and continued her sprint. So consumed was she with the desperation of finding her hiding place, that she did not notice the shifting figures in the shadows, did not notice the rapid breathing of multiple persons smothered by the roar of the klaxon.

By the time Sarah realized her mistake, her forward momentum could not be stopped, and it was far too late. The moments seemed to extend, as if the entire universe had been placed on pause. Sarah remembered stopping, remembered careening into the black-suited fronts of multiple men hefting considerably powerful weaponry across their chests. Their eyes were trained on her: impassive, iron, and unshakable.

But Sarah's own focus was not on her captors, rather the shadows over their shoulders, where something impossible had caught her eye. Mere milliseconds seemed to stretch for eternity.

In the corner, away from the drama of her capture, stood an incongruous blue box.

And in front of the box, pain in his huge eyes, anguish etching the marked lines of his face, was a tall, curly-haired man dressed in a battered coat and a flowing scarf.

He was carrying a body in his arms. An eerily familiar body, the shell of a memory out of nightmares best left forgotten.

"No . . ." Sarah murmured, and then she screamed, "NO!"

Sarah felt her head rocket back as a flash of white light shrieked through her skull. The world plummeted into soupy darkness, and she fell into blissful, wonderful unconsciousness.

The guards closed in on her decumbent form, and the _eye winked at the hand; yet let that be, which the eye fears, when it is done, to see._

* * *

"Present fears, are less than horrible imaginings."

He saw Sarah, the younger Sarah, the Sarah of days past, fall into unconsciousness, saw her body drop heavily to the floor, and then tore his eyes away. The men in black swarmed around her like ants around a picnic basket.

The Doctor could not watch. He was cowardly, and shame chained his hearts as he let himself into the TARDIS. He daren't stay any longer.

The doors closed with a satisfying _clump_, shutting out the horror beyond. The Doctor didn't bother setting coordinates. He gave Leela a meaningful glance, hefted Sarah further into his arms, and made his way to the door leading to the corridors of the TARDIS interior.

"Leela, pick somewhere. Anywhere. Just get us the hell away from this place." The Doctor ordered shakily. He didn't look back to see if she obliged. He rushed to the TARDIS sick bay, mentally preparing himself for what he had to do, both figuratively and literally.

Sarah Jane Smith had to have her mind back. She _must._

And that would mean forgetting. Forgetting every single thing that had happened to her leading up to her fated journey to the Lennox Institution. Wiping her mind of the horror, the pain, the terror and hopelessness that Lennox had inflicted. Wiping her mind of every scrap of detail.

Could someone be made to forget all that?

"Doctor . . ." A quaky, lilting voice murmured from the folds of his coat.

The Time Lord immediatly dropped to his knees and cradled Sarah in his arms, holding her like a father would a sick child. He saw, properly, the blistering scars marking the left side of her face, pickling the skin and pinching the pearly-white eye shut. Her brows and epidermis had not regrown, even after all this time. It made the Doctor queasy.

"I'm here."

"I didn't tell . . . Lennox." She whispered, barely audible, "I didn't betray you."

"I know, Sarah. Of course you didn't, you brave, wonderful woman." He gave her a wan smile, "Stay quiet. Rest yourself. I have something for the burns, a silver sulfadiazine cream from the Sisters of Plenitude. You'll be as right as rain in no time. No time at all . . ."

"You're going to make me forget, aren't you?"

"I have to." He pleaded.

"No."

"Sarah . . ."

"No! You must listen first. . . this is important." She insisted with as much strength as she could muster, reaching down to the depths of her mind. She was making a visible effort to hold on to the shreds of her sanity. "I didn't tell him because I couldn't let you leave me. You are my beautiful miscellaneous, Doctor."

He frowned. "Your what?"

"My wonderful collection of randomness." She smiled, "My waking dream. The things in this life I couldn't live without. Courage. Hope. Friendship. Trust. Love." She all but breathed the last words before she slipped back into oblivion, "I didn't give you up because I loved you too much. You were too important. Too . . . beautiful . . ."

She embraced unconsciousness again, becoming limp and unresponsive in his arms.

And the Doctor stared straight ahead, gazing into the far distance, to the last syllable of recorded time.

Seeing nothing but a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

The Doctor placed his middle and index fingers against Sarah's cold, clammy temples. He found the sensitive points of neurological impasse, and opened his mind to the nightmare.

* * *

"Contact." He whispered.


	18. Epilogue: To The Bitter Beginning

_Epilogue_

* * *

The Doctor, in his 5th Incarnation, was a chip off the old block from the legacies of his predecessors. While still in possession of a wickedly sharp intellect, a keen curiosity, and an overwhelming instinct to do good, the 5th Doctor liked to think of himself as a quieter, simpler man. He was the proverbial younger brother to the grandfatherly wisdom of his first persona, the subtle acumen of his second persona, the audacious heroism of his third persona, and the braggadocio, overwhelming personality of his fourth persona.

In fact, he oftentimes felt rather embarrassed to be associated with such larger-than-life characters, with men more celestial being than mortal creature of flesh and blood. Even though he was, technically, the eldest of his selves currently inhabiting the continuity of his personal timeline, he was by no means the most powerful. On Gallifrey, in the Death Zone, the 5th Doctor had felt almost intimidated by the bravado of his past lives, as if he were placed at the foot of a massive pedestal and left to look up at his former incarnations whose legacies he was counted upon to continue, gazing forlornly at massive shoes he was expected to fill.

In a way, he feared his nature, the fire he had harbored within himself before his agonizing regeneration at the Pharos Telescope. His fourth incarnation had been a tempest in a bottle, ready to crack under pressure and unleash something altogether entirely unpleasant. He resented his former body and his former self, because that man had died before a great many things had been settled. He had died leaving thousands of threads dangling and tangled and waiting to be tied up properly.

He had died, and left the 5th Doctor to do the impossible.

"Art thou afeard, Doctor?" He mused to himself, "Wouldst thou live a coward in thine own esteem?"

"Prithee, peace / I dare do all that may become a man / Who dares do more is none." A sallow, tired voice answered from the shadows of the TARDIS console room, speaking as if his words took every ounce of his waking willpower.

The Doctor glanced up, giving his bedraggled, bathrobed companion a wan smile. "Good evening, Turlough. I see you know your _Macbeth_."

Vislor Turlough didn't look particularly pleased at the Doctor's praise. His pale eyes were bleary, his carrot-red hair was mashed in at the sides. His already pale face was drawn and peaked from being awoken by the Doctor's tinkering in the middle of the night.

"Knowing it for pleasure and knowing it by requirement are two entirely different things." The boy retorted in that sardonic, cold-shouldered manner of his, "The Brigadier was more than adamant about teaching Shakespearian lore at that infernal school, but that didn't mean I had to enjoy it."

"Good to know you so cherished his educational efforts." The Doctor said drily. "Look on the bright side, eh? If you didn't know Shakespeare, who else would finish my monologues for me?"

Turlough rubbed some sleepy grit out of the corner of his eye. "Someone nocturnal, perhaps?"

The Doctor's attention left the displays of the console. He glanced at the dimmed lighting of the TARDIS interior, as if registering the darkened scape for the first time, and fixed Turlough with a cold, hard stare.

"Shouldn't you be in bed?"

Turlough sighed despairingly, "That's the idea."

"You really are the most terrible philistine. Why are you here, anyway?"

"You know, I don't mind your little nighttime jaunts." He said stiffly, "So long as you actually acknowledge the fact that the general populace of this ship, i.e. me, need their 8-10 hours."

"Sleep is for tortoises."

"Call me a tortoise, then. What on Earth, pardon the expression, are you doing at this ungodly hour making such ungodly racket?"

The Doctor bit his lip hesitantly, giving away his nerves as he breezed over the question. "Oh, nothing important."

"You're lying."

He shook his shaggy blond hair out of his face, and replied with the utmost indignation, "I most certainly am not!"

Turlough sighed again. "Don't you think I of all people would recognize a lie when I hear one. Come off it, Doctor. You've been getting progressively more restless over the past week. Every day it's been nothing but busy fiddling with the TARDIS console until all hours of the night. You haven't eaten a thing. You barely touch the tea Kamelion makes. I even offered to go with you to the 5th One Day International cricket match between South Africa and Australia, and you didn't even bat an eyelash! What's wrong?"

The Doctor didn't answer right away, but Turlough refused to be deterred by his silence.

"Well?"

The Time Lord didn't meet his companion's eyes. He bowed his head, and his lank blond hair fell back into his face, shrouding his usually bright, open features in shadow. Only this time, the Doctor didn't even bother to brush his locks back.

"Time is a fickle thing, Turlough." He murmured sadly, his voice gravely and cracked.

"I've always considered it to be remarkably steadfast."

"Ha. If only." The Doctor fingered the celery stalk on his lapel, the way he did whenever he was about to admit something painful. It was, Turlough reasoned, his way of forestalling much more damaging displays of emotion. "It's like you said when we were in Russia: 'Big events, all that huge history rolls down like an avalanche and we get crushed underneath. You push time, and time pushes back.'"

Turlough remembered all too well. "And have you been pushing time, Doctor?"

"Not _me _me. The man I was, a long time ago. My fourth incarnation set a series of events in motion on a path that cannot be varied or undone. Now the effects of his meddling have begun to snowball out of control, ready to consume me and everything in its path. He has forced me to do something for which I can never forgive myself."

"Doctor, I really don't understand."

"Then listen!" He barked, raising his voice in very un Doctor-like manner, "In my last body, I was a reckless man. I was a dangerous man, too. And I met another dangerous man, a man who reigned the fickleness of time's nature and molded it to his will. People were hurt, lots of people. People I cared about. People I loved."

"My former persona took it upon himself to avenge these people, to set right the damage that had been done to the Web of Time. But in doing so he created a recursion paradox, a never-ending progression of now to next that will continue to both create and destroy the timeline it encompasses until it is shredded to pieces under the forces of entropy. Instead of mending the threads of time, my fourth self took the already damaged chords and crudely plastered them together with duck tape. He didn't fix anything. He . . . I . . . just made things worse."

Turlough dared to ask, "What did he . . . you . . . do?"

"I saved the life of a woman I cared about." The Doctor said simply, "I tore her out of time in order to preserve her existence. But in doing so, I have damned her. I _will_ damn her."

Turlough was beginning to make sense of what he was saying, and for the rarest, most fleeting of moments, understood completely the extent of the Doctor's pain. Recursion paradoxes are only broken by committing an action to make them part of the normal course of history. And that action, Turlough feared, loomed ever closer on the Doctor's horizon.

"Sarah Jane Smith was caught and locked away by Thaddeus Lennox in a Time Barrier, placing her in her own pocket universe." The Doctor was talking more to himself than to Turlough now, "In doing so, Lennox created an alternate reality, one in which time was wound back on itself and the entire course of human history was destroyed. Sarah died, and the Earth died with her, consumed by temporal entropy like the poor people of the Traken Union."

"But I went back. I broke the barrier between Lennox's reality and this one and saved Sarah from her prison. I aborted the other timeline, and because Sarah had been locked away out of the normal time-space continuum, her rescue occurred _at the same time _as her original capture. In fact, our rescue CAUSED her capture! I _saw_ her younger self, Turlough. I saw her doomed as we were making our escape."

Turlough could only nod dumbly.

"But I've left the paradox only half-mended." The Doctor affirmed despairingly, but with the gravest of convictions, "How did Sarah know to come to the Lennox Institution that night? Why was she there in the first place? We are living on borrowed time, Turlough, you and me. A mere sliver of eternity stretched within an inch of its life like worn elastic, ready to snap in two. Ready to break. And I have to fix it. I have to condemn that woman to an infinitesimal amount of terror and agony, just to fix a paradox."

"But why now?" The boy insisted, "If your broken timeline has lasted this long, surely it can stretch a little further?"

"Entropy may erupt in a million years. Or it may erupt in a few seconds. I don't want to play dice with the universe anymore. I know, by sending Sarah into Lennox's hands, I am doing the right thing, but it certainly doesn't feel like it . . ."

The Time Lord sounded broken, and hopelessly lost, like a little boy drowning in a swimming pool and no longer being able to tell up from down.

Turlough put a hand on the Doctor's shoulder, turning his body and forcing him to meet his eye. "I began my life as a sheep, Doctor. Someone who obeyed orders absolutely because I couldn't find the willpower nor the courage to govern myself and make my own decisions. I obeyed the Black Guardian because I was selfish, and because I was scared. I wanted the security of my home back. I wanted the order and the structure and the rules, because I was frightened of the chaotic, big bad universe and was willing to lash out at the few good things it harbored, including you. You taught me that there was more to life than following orders. That there's more to the universe than evil men trying to give little children nightmares, just to frighten them into obedience. You taught me to trust again. You taught me to see the beauty of the universe again. And if I can trust you to turn me, Vislor Turlough, into a good man, then I sure as hell trust you to do the right thing now."

The Doctor gave his companion a quizzical glance. "Is that your beautiful miscellaneous?"

"My what?"

"Nothing." The Doctor peeled Turlough's hand off his shoulder. "Just something an old friend told me, once upon a time."

He started to input command into the central console. With a whistle of protest from the slumbering TARDIS, the central console began to rise and fall with melodious certainty.

"I would get dressed if I were you. I'm afraid we're off to one of your least favorite places, and it's rather biting in the autumn."

"Earth." Turlough muttered darkly.

"Earth." The Doctor agreed. "The 30th of September, 1986. South Croyden, London, England . . . the Planet Earth."

* * *

September 30th, 1986

South Croyden, London, England, Planet Earth

* * *

The Doctor had been careful to park the TARDIS quite a distance from the town-housy, middle class flat he and Turlough found themselves in front of. Unfortunately, the weather during their long walk had been nose-numbingly cold, and Turlough had been all too pleased to let the Doctor know that at every available opportunity. He hugged his school uniform closer around his shoulders, wishing for a bigger coat and the ushanka he'd left behind in Moscow.

The Doctor, of course, seemed completely at ease in the cold weather.

"I'd take the tube to the Gloucester station in South Kensington if I were you." The Doctor said suddenly, breaking off from his staring competition with the row of houses.

"Why would I want to do that?" Turlough asked snappishly.

"Because I want you to get a job in the coffee shop across the street from Stanhope Gardens and wait for a woman reciting Shakespeare." The Doctor replied cryptically, and then added, as if it made the request perfectly reasonable, "Please."

Turlough muttered something unflattering about Time Lords under his frosty breath, and began to stalk off towards the Tube. But before he rounded the street corner and was lost from the Doctor's view, he wheeled around, and something very close to sympathy flashed across his ashen, freckled face.

"You'll be all right, Doctor." He called. "You always are."

When the boy was out of sight, the Doctor sighed to himself, "I hope you're right."

He braced himself, and took a deep breath. He straightened his lapels and ensured his celery stalk hadn't been bent in half by the wind. He then crossed the street, bounded up to the flat's front door, and rang the buzzer.

_ Brrrrrrrring_

To the Doctor, it sounded like the Sunday tolling of the church-bell. During a funeral.

And from within the entry hall, he heard a familiar voice. Older, more mature, but definitely the same, wonderful, heart-achingly _real_ voice.

He heard her grasp the doorknob, and she was speaking before the door had even opened . . .

"Harry Sullivan, that was _not_ an invitation for you to . . ."

Sarah Jane Smith's wide brown eyes narrowed as she surveyed him, scanning him from head to foot like a dubious grocer does a piece of rotten fruit. Despite the age lines ghosting her mouth and eyes, she was still beautiful; her hair had grown longer and curlier, and she had tied it up into a bun. She was wearing a pair of grey sweatpants and an old Fleetwood Mac concert T-shirt, but she still looked stunning. She was still the same woman. The same Sarah.

She made his hearts hurt, and it took every ounce of the Doctor's willpower not to blurt out everything, or to run away terrified.

"Do you know who I am?" He asked hesitantly, and winced once he realized how terrible it sounded.

She replied with the utmost caution, "Not a clue, mate."

The Doctor took a deep breath. He cursed himself to the very limits of the known universe, knowing that he would never be able to forgive himself for what he was about to do, but decided to play the card that fate had dealt him. To complete the cycle. To lend the rope to hang his own beautiful, terrible miscellaneous.

"Oh, marvelous!" He tried to sound relieved,

* * *

"I have a message for Sarah Jane Smith."

* * *

_The End_


End file.
